Silicon Saxony

Silicon Saxony is a registered industry association of nearly 300 companies in the microelectronics and related sectors in Saxony, Germany, with around 40,000 employees. Many, but not all, of those firms are situated in the north of Dresden.

With a name chosen referring to Silicon Valley, the area and the union — in many aspects — represent the only meaningful European center of microelectronics. Many of those firms have very research and capital intensive business models competing with subsidized global players, mainly from Asia.

The companies develop and produce computer calculation and memory chips or new materials and electronics for solar companies. The developed and produced small semiconductors chips are used in all kinds of cars, mobile phones, TV sets and so on.

Even before Germany's reunification, Dresden was a major center of microelectronics in the Eastern bloc with 3,500 employees. While mechanical engineering, which has a long history in the south of eastern Germany, suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the microelectronics industry was, with public help from the state, one of the first industrial sectors in Saxony to recover. Although having many more employees today than before 1990, the sector is constantly under pressure because South Korea in particular is very keen to attract the industry. Saxony and Germany are however bound to the competition laws of the European Union, but was able to keep and expand most of the research parts of the industry that it had started with. These parts are seen as successful, but also as very risky whenever a larger company has serious problems because the sector demands a high concentration of resources to succeed.

Dresden, as core-region of Silicon Saxony and yet without the headquarters of many of today's big companies, is nevertheless a very remarkable technology center with one large Technical University (German TU), ten other universities and most of all an unparalleled density of semi-public institutes of applied high-technologies in many fields (for example the Max Planck Society, Fraunhofer Society, Leibniz institutes, Helmholtz Association and other German academic elite institutions).

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