Telecommunications engineer by training and with a long career in public administration, Roberto Sánchez (Madrid, 1954) is responsible for piloting Spain's jump to autonomy in microprocessors. In this interview, he discusses the newly approved Semiconductor Perte and sets the goal of being able to play a significant role in the chip supply chain.
What strategic impact will the Perte of semiconductors have on the Spanish economy?
It will be tremendous. In today's world, microprocessors are already part of our daily lives. They are in telephones, in household appliances, in cars, in health. The global demand for these semiconductors is growing and their manufacturing needs are very high. In Spain we have decided to play a role in this process of supplying microprocessors globally. It is a very high-tech industry and we place ourselves in the middle of value chains, building on our own strengths. From there we generated this industry, which has a very high impact and which will allow us to be one of the countries that leads this process of responding to such high demands.
In Europe only 10% of all microprocessors are manufactured and in Spain there are only factories with small productions. Why are we late?
We are not late, but it is a technologically complex and expensive industry that requires a lot of specialization. Now the demand is growing so much that it can justify economies of regional scale and with the latest supply problems, there is interest in promoting more local chains.
The objective is to recover strategic autonomy. When will we stop being dependent?
No country is totally independent because they are complex processes and the assembly of a device requires many parts. It is about whether Spain can play a role in supplying important parts of those devices. The goal is to be autonomous in 2030.
80% of Perte's public investment goes to the construction of the plants. Is manufacturing the big goal?
Yes, that's why we allocate 7.25 billion to state-of-the-art chip plants smaller than five nanometers and 2.1 billion to larger ones. The investment is greater for the avant-garde because they will be the generation of the future, where demand will grow the most, and since they are technologically more complicated, they are the most expensive. Right now, they are not produced in Europe.
Does the Perte focus on manufacturing because that is where we are the furthest behind?
That's not the problem. The point is that it is much more expensive to manufacture than to design. Building a semiconductor plant of less than five nanometers costs between 15,000 and 25,000 million euros. That is why public aid is around 7,000 million.
Without our own manufacturing capacity, we do not have autonomy.
We must flee from the concept of absolute autonomy. Nobody has absolute autonomy in a global chain, but more or less protagonism, more or less participation in the block of suppliers. If you participate, you are in a more privileged position within that supply chain. Not even the EU itself considers having complete autonomy because it is impossible. We want to have the ability to influence and have a strong influence on the supply chain.
What role will the Barcelona Supercomputing Center have in this process?
It's very important. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is our star supercomputing center. It leads in Europe the design of alternative architectures based on open systems for the design of very high performance microprocessors.
Speaking of another hot topic in the field of telecommunications, the Audiovisual Law was approved with the opposition of independent producers, who complain of favored treatment of television producers.
It is key that this law is approved because the audiovisual world has changed radically in the 12 years since the last law was approved. I understand your concern, but I'm going to give you a piece of information. With this law, the obligation to finance independent production in Spain is multiplied by four or five. If with the current law it would be around 70 million euros, with the new one it will be around 250 or 300 million. If this is killing cinema, I don't see it.
And why was it introduced with a last minute amendment as supposedly technical?
It is that it was a purely technical amendment, which gave a little more legal certainty. In any case, I understand the concern and we are going to establish a dialogue table to understand very well and reach an agreement on what is the possible interpretation and what worries the independent producers. Independent production is an activity that we want to promote and defend.
