Semiconductor History | Kapeldreef 75, Leuven — The Lab That Sells Neutrality

Engineers from companies that compete everywhere else share a cleanroom in this building.

That is what imec sells. Not chips, not tools, but a neutral place where rivals can develop the next generation of process technology together and still keep their own secrets.

imec opened on 16 January 1984 as the Interuniversitair Micro-Elektronica Centrum, with about seventy people.

It exists because of a regional government's decision two years earlier. In 1982 Gaston Geens launched a Flemish programme called the Derde Industriële Revolutie in Vlaanderen, and gave Roger Van Overstraeten of KU Leuven the job of putting Flanders on the microelectronics map.

The programme built three things: this laboratory, a chip factory called MIETEC at Oudenaarde which is now part of ON Semiconductor, and a training course for VLSI design engineers.

Flanders had almost no semiconductor industry to build on. What it had was a university research group that had grown past seventy people and past what a university could fund.

Van Overstraeten had taken his doctorate at Stanford in 1963, and the model he brought back was Stanford's: an institution sitting deliberately between fundamental academic work and industry, with the industry being the whole world's rather than the region's.

The economics arrived later and vindicated it. Developing each new process node became too expensive for almost any single company, so sharing the cost with competitors stopped being unthinkable and became ordinary.

A lab that belongs to nobody is the only place that can happen.

imec did not begin on this site. It moved here in 1986, and the cantilevered tower photographed in 2018 is a later addition to a campus that has been growing for four decades.

Van Overstraeten led it until he died in 1999, aged sixty-one. Gilbert Declerck took over that June, and Luc Van den hove has run it since July 2009.

The place now holds more than five thousand five hundred researchers from over ninety countries, and around twelve thousand square metres of cleanroom.

In 2023 Van den hove received the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, the year before it went to 蔡明介 of MediaTek, which is a small sign of where the industry's centre of gravity had moved by then.

The address is Kapeldreef 75, in Heverlee on the southern edge of Leuven, and it is an office and cleanroom complex with nothing for a visitor to look at.

About four hundred metres to the southeast is Arenberg Castle, which is what people actually photograph here, and which belongs to the university that imec was built to grow out of.

Photo: Kvdh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (imec headquarters, Leuven, July 2018).