Madrid BarcelonaAlejandro Sánchez is one of the few who has seen the birth and death of a microchip factory in Spain. He still has memories of a time when the plant of the American multinational AT&T produced 6,000 wafers of silicon a week in an industrial estate in Tres Cantos (Madrid). It was inaugurated in 1987 to say goodbye to 2001. Now the same land is abandoned, while the Spanish government is trying to relaunch the industry through a LOSS of 12.25 billion euros. “When the factory closed we were a thousand people with a training that could not be used and we dispersed,” says this doctor in physics, who now works at the Alba Synchrotron in Cerdanyola del Vallès.
But what happened before that outcome? Spain came from years of technological famine. Josep Piqué (PP), who was Minister of Industry during the time of José María Aznar (PP), recalls that under the government of Felipe González (PSOE) a “significant technological investment” had been lost, which aroused controversy. ”He points out in a conversation with ARA.
Later, “an attempt was made to compensate for the frustration”, adds Piqué, and this is where Tres Cantos comes into play. Quickly, the gear of a “technological revolution” was set in motion in this Madrid town that would later give rise to the Madrid Technology Park (PTM), an area of almost 300,000 square meters that today has about 80 companies sectors such as electronics, telecommunications or computing.
The icing on the cake came in 1987 with AT&T Electronics. The company chose Tres Cantos to place its first microchip plant outside the United States. The person in charge of directing the project would be Jaime Martorell Suárez, whom the Spanish government has now appointed commissioner for the loss of microchips. For a year, AT&T sent about 30 workers, including Alejandro Sánchez, to its plants in the United States before launching the most ambitious project the state has ever hosted in the field of semiconductors. “At that time in Spain there was little tradition in the sector,” says Sánchez. After a few years of time to get everything ready, he says that Tres Cantos became one of the best performing centers in the company.
Over the years, however, the factory changed owners until the latter, the company Agere System, decided to lower the shutter in 2001 and sell the plant to BP (British Petroleum) for the manufacture of solar panels. . The decision affected 1,000 employees. “These factories require very large investments to adapt to technological changes every two or three years,” adds Sánchez. In the case of semiconductors, European factories could not resist the push of competitors coming from Asia.
Neither Spain nor Europe could compete, Piqué recalls. The former minister said that while design capacity remained, “Europe decided it was interested in outsourcing production to Asia and, in particular, to South Korea and Taiwan.” This is known as large relocation. Seeking to reduce costs, large technology multinationals moved the manufacturing of much of the value chain to Asian countries. A process that has jeopardized geostrategic independence, they lament today from the sector and from politics.
The Catalan case
However, this is not the only bad end for the semiconductor industry in Spain. Before the Tres Cantos plant, in Catalonia there was Piher, a local capital manufacturer (its name comes from the surnames Pipó and Heredero) that was dedicated to transistors. The Badalona company had expanded since the late 1940s (they had factories in Granollers, Badalona and Tudela, in Navarre), but found itself immersed in a plot worthy of a war spy film Cold. “They were blacklisted by CoCom, the U.S. agency for monitoring exports to the East, and their obsession with American technology not reaching the enemy,” said Professor honorary member of the UB’s Department of Economic History, Ángel Amado Calvo.
Piher was found guilty in a U.S. court of having exported technology imported from the United States to Cuba and the Soviet Union. The case cost him a fine of 300 million pesetas (1.8 million euros in exchange) from which he never recovered. In 1986 he filed for suspension of payments. “From Piher came very well-educated people who we picked up from other institutions,” says Paco Serra, who was the first director and promoter of the National Center for Microelectronics. “It was a real trauma,” recalls Josep Piqué, then director general of industry (1986-1988) of Jordi Pujol’s government.
The debate reopens
Now, grief has taken hold in a Europe where there are no chip and semiconductor factories, one of the components that has suffered the most from supply chain problems as a result of the covid-19 crisis. This shortcoming has forced governments to roll up their sleeves in order to reverse dependence on key sectors such as this. One step has been taken by Europe, presenting a law for the EU to produce 20% of semiconductors worldwide by 2030. The other has been taken by the Spanish government with the approval of the loss of microchips with a public investment of 12.25 billion euros.
“Spain is high”, they say from the sector, who see how the bulk of the investment goes to the manufacture of the smallest microchips (less than 5 nanometers). A development that they see “complicated” by its high complexity and the huge amount of money it requires. “There are many grades, not all of them are state-of-the-art chips, which may not be what we should be producing here,” says Serra. For his part, Amado remembers the mistakes of the past and asks that the choice of the location of the projects not end up becoming a race between neighbors.