Opinion

Fund the open ecosystem, not the closed copy

Imec's Leuven cleanrooms already run High-NA lithography, and Brussels holds the Chips Act 2.0 tools to scale them. Washington is building a copy of Leuven with American interests first.

Only two research centres in the world are getting ASML's newest High-NA lithography machines. One is Imec in Leuven, where a 350-million-euro High-NA scanner already stands. The other is Albany, New York. Ahead of SEMICON Europa in Munich this month, Imec's chief executive Patrick Vandenameele told SEMI how Europe wins what comes next: by connecting the strengths of its whole chip value chain. Fund the open ecosystem, the one Europe already has. Do not build the closed copy.

Albany is the rival, and Washington chose it for that. The NSTC centre there, born of the CHIPS and Science Act, has 14,000 square metres of cleanrooms, more than Imec's 12,000, with Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, Micron and IBM signed up to work in them. NIST has tied its funding to self-reliance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick names the goal plainly: protect, bring back and revive American capacity. Jonathan Holslag presses the doubt from the European side: Imec and ASML are assets to be proud of but not talismans, and the United States and China are working toward a world in which Europe's dependence on them disappears. Imec's turnover is about 1.2 billion euros, ASML's almost 33 billion. With federal money, Washington is building a copy of Leuven with American interests first. Holslag calls the model no talisman. It is the model Washington is now paying to rebuild.

Europe can still lead by 2030, with the money aimed right.

Vandenameele makes the point sharper: with intelligence emerging from chains of models, tools and agents, inference becomes a memory-and-connectivity challenge as much as a compute problem. Design, memory, photonics and packaging must be orchestrated together, early, with shared roadmaps and test vehicles for co-optimising across technologies and physics. That is what Imec calls CMOS 2.0: the next Moore's Law, made at the level of the system rather than by lithography alone, and silicon photonics with it attacks the bottlenecks in performance, bandwidth and power. Vandenameele calls the next five years the industry's biggest opportunity. Brussels expects the global chip market to reach €1.37 trillion by 2030, with AI components driving about 70 percent of the growth. Whoever orchestrates the ecosystem takes the share.

The Commission and the member states hold the instruments, so they should use them. The Chips Act 2.0 brings the Grand Challenges, the strategic projects and the First-of-a-Kind state-aid route for the whole value chain, plus a twelve-month permitting clock. Point all of it at Imec's model, the shared roadmaps, not the closed copies. Belgium shows one way through: its federal government is spending 3.7 billion euros over ten years on ODIN, a defence-technology incubator, with 10 million euros a year of it going to Imec for battlefield sensors and secure communication, and Defence Minister Theo Francken calling the partnership a trump card nobody else has. The first Chips Act mobilised more than 52 billion euros and created an estimated 46,000 jobs; the second scales that choice. Ministers, pass the Chips Act 2.0 this year and point its strategic projects at the open model.