Semiconductor History | Neerbosch, Nijmegen — The Fab Closing Because the Wafer Got Bigger

A dark blue building behind a road with snow melting on the verge, NXP Semiconductors lettered across the frontage. February 2012.

Philips started making semiconductors in Nijmegen in the early 1950s, and this complex is where that business ended up.

The opening year is not a simple fact, and NXP's own website gives two answers. Its corporate history page dates the first chip production facility here to 1955, while its own blog dates a semiconductor factory here to 1953.

Both are right about different buildings. The city's own account is that Philips moved into premises in the centre of Nijmegen in 1953, and that the large complex near Neerbosch followed two years later.

This pin is the Neerbosch site.

NXP's blog also calls it Europe's first semiconductor factory, and that claim needs narrowing. Philips began semiconductor production at Hamburg in the same period, and Nexperia says the fab it runs there has existed since 1953.

What is not in doubt is what the site became. It grew into one of the largest semiconductor production locations in Europe, and the cluster on and around it now holds NXP, Ampleon and Nexperia, all of them descended from the same Philips division that started here.

The division itself was separated from Philips in 2006 and became NXP.

The site is now scheduled to end.

At NXP's investor day in November 2024 its operations chief said the company would exit 200 millimetre manufacturing completely, and that the migration would take about ten years. In June 2025 Dutch reporting named Nijmegen as one of four wholly owned fabs to be closed, the other three in the United States.

About seventeen hundred people work here. It is NXP's largest production site.

The reason is wafer diameter rather than failure. A 300 millimetre wafer yields roughly two and a quarter times what a 200 millimetre wafer does, which moves the fixed costs of a plant onto far more chips.

The replacement capacity is being built as joint ventures rather than as NXP plants: ESMC at Dresden, where NXP holds about a tenth, and VSMC at Singapore, where it holds about two fifths. Both were under construction with production expected from 2027.

So one of Europe's oldest working fabs closes, and the European capacity that replaces it is a minority stake in somebody else's factory in Saxony.

This is live and the timing has moved before. Anything here about dates after 2025 should be checked against current reporting before it is relied on.

What a visitor can see is the frontage in this photograph, from the public road, which is all a working fab ever offers.

Photo: Agora, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (NXP Semiconductors on the Nieuwe Dukenburgseweg, Nijmegen, February 2012).