Semiconductor History | Zona Industriale, Catania — Where Europe Bet on Silicon Carbide

A curved glass office frontage bolted onto a blue industrial hall, with process plant, scrubber stacks and pipework across its roof. An ST fab in the industrial zone south of Catania, photographed in September 2023.

Chipmaking has been going on in this zone since the 1960s, which is not where anyone would have put it.

The company that brought it was ATES, a valve and semiconductor maker from L'Aquila in Abruzzo, which moved its manufacturing to the Catania industrial zone and took a name announcing the fact: Azienda Tecnica ed Elettronica del Sud, the technical and electronic company of the South.

In 1972 ATES merged with Società Generale Semiconduttori, founded in 1957 by Olivetti and Telettra, and the combined SGS Microelettronica became the Italian half of what merged with Thomson Semiconducteurs fifteen years later.

So the Sicilian plant arrived inside STMicroelectronics as inheritance rather than as a decision.

What it became was not inherited. Catania is where ST built its silicon carbide work, alongside the University of Catania and the CNR, and it is where most of the company's silicon carbide research and design staff sit.

Silicon carbide matters because it holds up under voltages and temperatures that ordinary silicon does not, which is what an electric car's inverter needs.

On 31 May 2024 ST announced a Silicon Carbide Campus here: a 200 millimetre fab for power devices and modules with test and packaging, joining a substrate plant already under construction on the same ground.

The European Commission approved the Italian state aid the same day.

The programme is about five billion euros, of which roughly two billion comes from the Italian state under the EU Chips Act. ST describes the result as the first fully integrated silicon carbide facility in the world, meaning substrate, epitaxy, wafers and modules on one site.

At full build-out it is meant to run up to fifteen thousand wafers a week, reaching capacity in 2033.

The record I can verify stops in April 2025, when ST said the campus was progressing as planned with first 200 millimetre production due in the fourth quarter of that year, and simultaneously announced that up to twenty-eight hundred people would leave the company worldwide on a voluntary basis over three years.

Whether the first wafers actually ran on schedule is not something I could confirm, and anyone using this entry after 2025 should check.

Two things are worth holding together. Europe's largest single bet on power semiconductors is being made in Sicily, on ground the industry reached because of a southern industrial policy sixty years ago.

And it is being made by the company from the previous entry in this collection, whose head office is a Swiss car park and whose legal home is Dutch.

Photo: Webonline2007, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (an STMicroelectronics building at Catania, September 2023). The Silicon Carbide Campus is about two kilometres north of this pin, in the same industrial zone.