IN Brief:
- GlobalFoundries and Qualinx have completed an end-to-end European manufacturing flow at GF Dresden.
- The first device is a Qualinx QLX3xx GNSS SoC for secure positioning, navigation, and timing.
- The work supports trusted European chip production for aerospace, defence, and critical infrastructure.
GlobalFoundries and Qualinx have completed a European semiconductor manufacturing flow for security-critical chips, using GF’s Dresden fab and FDX process technology.
The milestone covers the design intake, mask services, and wafer manufacturing steps needed to produce chips inside the European Union. Qualinx served as the launch customer with its QLX3xx system-on-chip design for secure GNSS-based positioning, navigation, and timing applications.
Designed for resilient timing, synchronisation, and ultra-low-power satellite positioning, the QLX3xx device targets applications in aerospace, defence, critical infrastructure, and connected-edge systems. The production route keeps sensitive design data and physical materials inside Europe, addressing security requirements from governments, systems integrators, and infrastructure operators.
GF’s Dresden operation is using the project as an operational step towards a more automated trusted manufacturing route, co-funded by the European Chips Act. The company aims to establish the flow by the end of 2026, with aerospace, defence, and critical infrastructure customers expected to gain access through regular foundry engagements from 2027.
Beyond wafer processing, GF is working with European connectivity and cloud providers, including Deutsche Telekom, to assess how production data from design and tape-out through manufacturing, test, and quality processes can be handled inside Europe. Secure routing, encryption, access control, and regional data storage are becoming part of the manufacturing specification for sensitive silicon, particularly where devices support public infrastructure or defence programmes.
Secure positioning and timing devices show why provenance has become a design constraint. GNSS and PNT technologies support communications networks, electricity grids, financial systems, transport infrastructure, military platforms, and industrial control environments. Jamming, spoofing, cyber exposure, and geopolitical supply-chain risk are now being considered alongside power consumption, integration, and cost.
Europe already has strong positions in research, equipment, power electronics, FD-SOI, photonics, sensors, and industrial systems, but trusted end-to-end production routes remain harder to assemble. The UK’s move to create a broader Semiconductor Catapult reflects the same pressure from another direction: research capability has to connect with manufacturable, application-led supply chains.
The GF and Qualinx work does not remove Europe’s dependence on global semiconductor ecosystems, nor does it pretend that sovereignty can be created at a single fab. It does, however, establish a practical route for a class of chip where jurisdiction, data handling, traceability, and production control are part of the technical case.
Security-critical silicon is increasingly judged by the integrity of the chain behind it. For GNSS, PNT, aerospace, defence, and infrastructure systems, a chip’s manufacturing route is becoming part of its trust model rather than a detail left to procurement.
