Blue Wonder will design chips for the next generation of mobile phones, based on the emerging technical standard known as Long Term Evolution, or LTE. The company is in its infancy but the staff is not; most of them already know one another from working on another start-up together, a company that eventually became part of NXP, a spinoff of the Dutch electronics giant Philips, which closed its Dresden research center last year.
In truth, many were happy to go. Drescher recalls a smile creeping across a colleague’s face when the decision was announced.
“The fun factor is gone when your company is suddenly large,” Drescher said.
Barely six months later they were ensconced in a new office, on the third floor of a small office building that looks down on the Elbe River.
On a recent morning, Drescher, 43, clicked through a series of PowerPoint slides for Jurk.
“Knowledge beats production,” screamed one slide, while another drove the point home to the man who sometimes steers tax money toward local companies: “Saxony has to invest in development, less in production.”
Later, behind closed doors, Drescher delivered a pitch to Jurk, one his ministry is still mulling over. Blue Wonder needs test chips — products that incorporate its designs as prototypes — and is asking the state of Saxony to help finance them.
Blue Wonder, aware of the advantage of working with a German producer, wants to rely on the Global Foundries plant in Dresden, which is eager to diversify its roster of clients.
POLITICAL REALITIES
The idea reflects the political realities in Saxony, and indeed, Germany.
“I would say that the preference for manufacturing is at least as strong here as it is anywhere in Germany,” said Heinz Martin Esser, a managing director of Silicon Saxony, the industry’s local trade association.
It is, he added, “in the blood of the Saxons.”
The state worked hard early this decade to attract Porsche and BMW factories to Leipzig, its other major city after Dresden. And Chemnitz, once known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, has become a center for machine-tool makers.
Jurk, a 20-year veteran of Saxon politics, responded earlier this year to Qimonda’s request for help because he was sensitive to the fact that production facilities tended to employ more people than research labs.
Moreover, Qimonda supported a range of capital-intensive research efforts around Dresden.
No one knew that better than Juergen Ruestig, the scientific director of Namlab, a research center that was a partnership between Qimonda and a local university, which took over the insolvent company’s share of the venture.
Namlab’s research into nanotechnology will eventually help create more compact chip designs, and Ruestig had planned on sounding out what might interest the market through its partnership with Qimonda.
“Producers are your connection to the customer,” Ruestig said.
That’s a powerful argument, but Drescher counters that making things yourself is not as critical as it once was.
Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest makers of communications chips, owns nary a factory. And the place where the industry all began just lost its last semiconductor plant, without losing its dynamism, Drescher said.
“Silicon Valley isn’t a factory anymore,” he said. “It’s a think tank.”
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