Building a Swiss FabLab: the future of Switzerland’s semiconductor strategy

In this episode of The Swiss Connection science podcast, we're digging into the push to create a Swiss FabLab, a shared chip fabrication laboratory that brings public research and private industry together under the Swiss Chip Alliance. Our host Jo Fahy is joined by swissinfo.ch's business and tech specialist Matthew Allen to unpack what’s being proposed near Zurich, why it’s still at the conceptual phase, and what it could mean for Switzerland's semiconductor industry as global investment surges.

You can read more about the Swiss semiconductor industry here.  

Journalist: Matthew Allen
Host: Jo Fahy
Audio editor: Michele Andina
Distribution and Marketing: Xin Zhang

SWI swissinfo.ch is a public service media company based in Bern, Switzerland. 

Transcript

Cold Open On The Fab Lab

Jo Fahy 0:52

SwissInfo podcasts.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

The Swiss semiconductor industry, plus leading universities, have decided that Switzerland needs its own Fab Lab, and that's short for fabrication laboratory.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

It is a business where innovation cycles are short. Ten years old machine is outdated. We have to move local fast.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

What they're trying to do is to copy the likes of a Fab Lab in Finland.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

All these facilities are also available for external companies. And then we have the university which is focusing the basic sciences. This is a good combination of different types of organizations.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

It's a very expensive and time-consuming business. You need these clean rooms, like a factory that's as sterile as an operating theater.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

People always think a machine like this can be used as an operator. No. It's usually highly skilled people that operate it.

Jo Fahy 2:03

Countries are pumping billions into boosting their semiconductor industries, and Switzerland is no exception with plans to build a new chip-making factory. But what makes semiconductors so vital these days, and why are they so difficult to produce? That's what we're talking about today on the Swiss Connection Science Podcast. The Swiss private industry and public academia are joining forces under the Swiss Chip Alliance banner to focus attention on Switzerland's small, high-end semiconductor industry. The Alliance wants to maintain Swiss semiconductor competitiveness as the industry grows worldwide. And I'm joined in the studio by our business and tech specialist, Matthew Allen, who's been investigating this field for quite a while now. Welcome, Matt. Hi Joe. So Switzerland wants to ramp up the research and the production of semiconductors. What's the story here, Matt?

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Well, many people will have heard already of these huge semiconductor plants in Taiwan and the US and Korea. Well, the Swiss semiconductor industry, plus leading universities, have decided that Switzerland needs its own Fab Lab, and that's short for fabrication laboratory. So it's the project has been led by Swiss MEM, which represents the Swiss electrical engineering industry, plus the Federal Technical Institute's ETH Zurich, and the materials testing laboratory Emperor. And this in turn has attracted the attention of some commercial players such as Esbros and Hitachi Energy, who already make semiconductors in Switzerland. Now the idea is to combine research and production of a very niche high-end type of semiconductor, the type of semiconductors or chips that are used in robotics, satellite communications, or self-driving vehicles.

Why Chips Matter Right Now

Jo Fahy 4:09

Okay, so they've definitely got big plans. But why exactly have semiconductors become so important at the moment? What can you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_02 4:16

Well, it's simply because the world is becoming more digital by the day, by the year. You have chips and just about anything electrical, powering those devices, anything from wearables to cars, even to the remote control of your TV. And when you look at the technologies that are in development, they're going to need even more chips, like sort of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, 6G communications, space exploration. And so a lot of countries have decided that they want a slice of the action. And for example, if you look at Italy, the Italian government is uh contributing 2 billion euros into a 5 billion fab lab in Sicily. You've got Micron Technology announcing it wants to build a 24 billion plant in Singapore, and Texas Instruments is ramping up its own semiconductor production in the US with an extra 60 billion. So there's a lot of money sloshing around.

Funding Timeline And Foreign Models

Jo Fahy 5:15

Certainly a lot of money, and of course Switzerland wants to have a piece of that pie as well, I imagine. If we can briefly come back to that fab lab that you mentioned earlier, what stage is that at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Well, at the moment it's still quite conceptual. It's it's really on the drawing board, and they plan to have this uh project built uh hopefully within the next five years. I mean, they've secured a site at the uh innovation park on the outskirts of Zurich. But first of all, the consortium needs funding. It's gonna be a public-private uh project, and they need the funds from uh both sides to get it off the ground. What they're trying to do is to uh copy the likes of um uh a fab lab called VTT Micronova in Finland or another one called IMEC in Belgium. These are two small countries that are done very well producing these fab labs. I spoke to Jürg Leutold, who heads the IT and electrical engineering departments at ETH Zurich. Why Switzerland needs to follow suit?

SPEAKER_00 6:17

It is a business, their innovation cycles are short. Uh ten years old machine is outdated. We have to move forward fast. And don't the industry beliefs is the waste of money that you've invested.

Jo Fahy 6:35

You mentioned so many countries that are investing so much money there, Matt. And I'm just really wondering, you know, what kind of a chance does Switzerland have in becoming a top competitor in this field? Do they stand a chance? Where are they positioned?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Well, Switzerland's always said that it doesn't want to become an NVIDIA or to replicate any of those huge plants that I mentioned, like in Taiwan. Um, the industry is very niche. Uh, they they produce uh chips and other equipment. There's a whole host of other paraphernalia to build these factories that Switzerland is also very good at. Um what it wants to do is to consolidate all this industry is spread out all over Switzerland, and they believe it's best to put it all under one roof to give it a better chance of becoming more efficient and thus competing in that way.

How Chips Are Actually Made

Jo Fahy 7:26

And this process of chip making in itself, how does that work? Could you run run us through that?

SPEAKER_02 7:31

Well, it's a very expensive and time-consuming business. Even for the smaller chips, it takes at least three months and it can take a lot longer to produce the uh uh the bigger and more complex chips. Um there are many, many stages uh involving and lots of equipment and uh specialist uh fabrication to build them. I'll just give you the four main sort of stages you would go through. First of all, you have this silicon wafer where it all starts, and you have to spray that wafer with special chemicals, and then you imprint the template of your chip on top of it, needing special machinery. Then you need another bit of kit to actually etch or scratch that image onto the wafer with uh nanometer scale, and then you heat the whole thing up to about a thousand degrees Celsius, and then after that you've got to assemble it, as uh what they call a packaging process. Um it's not just the steps you're talking about, it's it's and the machinery, it's also the uh the actual building you need. You need these clean rooms, uh which are uh like a factory that's as sterile as an operating theatre. You've got to remove all dust and hair away from it. Um they cost uh at least a hundred million francs or euros to build. And those huge ones that I told you about can go up into, as I've said before, multiple billions. And then you need the machines to actually do these uh uh um stages, and they can run anything from the tens to the hundreds of millions. So it's a very expensive, very complex business.

Jo Fahy 9:12

It sounds like something that would also require a very specialized workforce as well. So I imagine it's not just uh terms of financial investment, but potentially Switzerland's also going to have to invest in kind of the training and recruitment of people to work in this field.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Well, that's right. I mean, when Taiwan, which is famous for uh building these huge uh plants, the first thing they did um after building them, or at the same time as building them, was to establish an education system which actually produced the engineers and the technologists needed to run these plants because you like in an operating theater, you need special skills. Um of course the federal technology institutes are producing some of these technologists. Uh I imagine part of this project will be to even ramp that up as well.

Jo Fahy 10:01

And if we could kind of zoom in on the detail here, what would the Swiss chip laboratory look like? Give us a little bit of a picture of that.

SPEAKER_02 10:07

Well, it's uh it's centered around a uh 4,000 square meter clean room. And and like I said, this is like a sterile room that has to be maintained also at a constant temperature and humidity. But around it, they're gonna have research labs where scientists can uh conduct their research on the next generation of chips. They're also gonna have office space for uh commercial players as well, so it's very much a uh an academic and commercial kind of basis. So, like I mentioned before, they're trying to model it on the micronova of Finland. And I I spoke to the person who runs this institute called Tauno Vaja Hikala.

SPEAKER_03 10:49

All these facilities are also available for external companies, not only Finnish companies, but uh companies uh all over the world. So we have US-based companies, Japanese companies, Central European companies, and then we are also offering research and development services for them. We are now expanding this uh facility. But what is also unique is that uh next to VTT's facility, uh there will be uh company uh specific own clean rooms so that companies can use their own equipment in their own clear rooms. It's very important that uh if you move from one clean room to another one, everything stays under the same conditions so that, for example, the semiconductor devices are not taken out from the clean room, and that's very unique. There are not too many that kind of places in the world. And we also have the Alder University research is also done in the same facility, so there is also some part of the clean room facilities operated by the Alder University. So I think this is a nice combination that we have companies making products and the advanced research and development. Then uh we have VTT, they are doing applied research and development, and then we have uh the university which is focusing on the basic sciences. So I think this is a good combination of different types of organizations in the same place.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

So, as as you just heard, this is a place where where small companies can rent workspace to do their work, and the large companies can actually um have their own uh space set aside for them. And Vahau Hikala uh predicts that those uh companies coming in uh to a new facility that actually they're building on onto the side of the the present facility, they these companies will bring in around 500 million euros uh in extra funding. So again, the sums of money uh are uh are quite spectacular. The Fab Lab supporters, the the people who want to build the Fab Lab in in Switzerland realize that it is gonna cost a lot in initial investment. But because of this sort of private money coming in, they're quite confident that the investment will be uh uh paid back in good time. And the Finnish model also shows the sense of combining research and production under one roof. Here's Jürgen Leutod of uh ETH Zurich again.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

If you have multiple clean rooms, you have high cost. The initial setting up is an initial investment. ETH could by concentrating the clean rooms at one location. Obviously, save cost increase the usage time, shorten the investment cycle by renewing the technology, and particularly we would have all experts at one location, not have the spread. Because people always think a machine like this can be used with an operator, no. Usually very hard people that operate that if you spread you get uh step three, but not step four. And you have to know the price of this machine is getting increasingly expensive. You might get out of the competition if you don't do it. Then you have something that's then you have to look at the next generation. Now each is the location where you purchase the latest machinery and tested uh for the latest stuff. If we give access to the machinery to the industry. And first of all, the industry gets access to the lower price, our usage time goes up and reduces the cost.

Can Switzerland Win By Going Niche

Jo Fahy 14:55

So it sounds like they've got a very concrete plan in terms of both financing and how how that whole place is really gonna work, even. So, Matt, tell me what's your prediction now then? Will Switzerland manage to stay competitive or even find its own niche in this vast area?

SPEAKER_02 15:11

Well, it must be noted Switzerland does have a semiconductor industry. It's not very well known. Uh, it's very niche and uh uh split up into different parts. I should imagine that Switzerland wants to keep it this way. They're not going to try and go into mass production of computer chips, but they're just gonna go for this high-end niche stuff. And and it's very similar in a way to the um uh car industry in Switzerland. Switzerland doesn't build its own cars, but it has a very prominent industry in providing parts such as sort of chemical coatings or electrical devices for those cars, and they have a very strong collaboration with the car manufacturers. It's a very important industry for Switzerland. I can imagine that the semiconductor industry could grow into such a scale. But I do see the sense of uh consolidating all the different parts. And it's also worth uh noting that it's not just the chips that Switzerland makes, it's uh as I mentioned before, we've got these clean rooms. They've got to be kept uh spotless uh at the right temperature. For that, you need sensors, you need vacuum valves, and there are the Swiss companies that produce that. So I would predict there's a pretty good chance that the semiconductor industry could sort of transform itself into the like the car industry in Switzerland and and be pretty successful uh if it if this if they can pull off this Fab Lab and and other ventures like it.

Jo Fahy 16:40

Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, it certainly seems like a a worthwhile investment for this industry to try and move forward in in that kind of way. And it's obviously a very exciting time for computer technology at the moment, anyhow. So, Matt, thank you so much for being with us today.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Thanks, Joe.

Break Announced And Listener Requests

Jo Fahy 16:55

So at the Swiss Connection Science Podcast, we're now taking a small break while we're working on our new and very exciting stories. But don't worry, we'll be back soon with a brand new season. And until then, if you haven't already heard them, you can scroll back in your feed and listen to our previous episodes. We have a very big variety of science stories ranging from AI, tech to climate research and even medicine as well. You can find even more science stories on our website swisinfo.ch. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode was recorded and edited by our science and video journalist Michaeli Andina. I'm Joe Fay. Thanks for listening.