Semiconductor History | Wilschdorf, Dresden — Real Men Have Fabs, and Then They Didn't

Advanced Micro Devices built its first processor plant outside the United States in a field on the northern edge of Dresden. AMD founded AMD Saxony in 1996 and broke ground that October on Fab 30; the cleanroom was equipped from May 1998, the fab opened in October 1999, and a trade magazine named it fab of the year in 2001. The choice of Saxony was not sentimental. Wages were low, the reunified German state was offering subsidies and unusually fast permitting, and the region had something the money could not buy, which was several thousand people who already knew how to make chips. That part predates the Wall coming down. The physicist Werner Hartmann set up a molecular electronics unit in Dresden-Klotzsche in 1961, and by the 1980s the East German combine Robotron employed something close to seventy thousand people in the city. Much of that industry worked by reverse engineering Western parts, because the machines to do otherwise were embargoed. A veteran of the Dresden plant later told AFP that the former GDR engineers arriving at the new fab could explain the inside of a chip better than its own engineers within two days, which she put down to the scarcity economy they had trained in. The company names kept changing above the same buildings. Siemens opened a Dresden site in 1994 that is now Infineon; AMD added Fab 36 for 300-millimetre wafers between 2003 and 2005; and in 2009 AMD spun its manufacturing out entirely, so the plant became GlobalFoundries Fab 1. Jerry Sanders, who founded AMD, had spent years saying that real men have fabs. His company then stopped having them, which is the single sentence that best describes what happened to integrated chipmakers between 1996 and 2009. Fab 1 is now the largest semiconductor plant in Europe by workforce, with somewhere over three thousand staff, and it anchors a cluster that took the name Silicon Saxony. The 2005 photograph shows the site from the air with fields on three sides, the village of Wilschdorf at the top of the frame and bare earth where the next building was going. Photo: Henry Mühlpfordt, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.