IMEC offers neutral ground amid chip rivalries

LEUVEN IS PERHAPSIMECTSMCASMLRDIMEC best known to the general public as the birth place of Stella Artois. Among chipmakers the Belgian city’s biggest claim to fame sits in a squat building not far from the Leuven Institute for Beer Research. Metal banding lends its facade the glittering look of a silicon wafer etched with microcircuitry. Inside, its lower floors hum with the noise of $3bn-worth of some of the most complex equipment humanity has ever devised. The offices above house hundreds of the planet’s keenest semiconductor engineers dreaming up the future of chipmaking.The building (pictured) is the headquarters of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre. , as it is better known, does not design chips (like America’s Intel), manufacture them (like of Taiwan) or make any of the complicated gear in its basement (like , a Dutch firm). Instead, it creates knowledge used by everyone in the $550bn chip business. Given chips’ centrality to the modern economy—highlighted by the havoc wrought by current shortages—and increasingly to modern geopolitics, too, that makes it one of the most essential industrial research-and-development (&) centres on the planet. Luc Van den hove, ’s boss, calls it the “Switzerland of semiconductors”.