All confirmed: Silicon Box, one of the companies in the world that is pioneering the so-called chiplet sector, will arrive in Italy for a plant that could open up very important scenarios in the field of innovation for our country.
The project details have been illustrated yesterday at the Ministry of Industry and Made in Italy: the Singaporean company will settle in Novara, invest 3.5 billion (plus another 6 billion in operating costs over the next 15 years) and hire 1600 people. The news is not unexpected.
Silicon Box had announced the agreement with the Government that also supports the project financially, last March 11. Then some previews released by the Reuters agency, had correctly indicated the location of the plant that is being built between Piedmont and Lombardy, in the center of the industrial triangle, in an area that is a logistical and road crossroads.
The fallout of the settlement which has national significance (as well as obviously local given the transformative impact of the territory) they are potentially immense and, as Minister Urso, the President of the Piedmont Region Alberto Cirio and Mayor Canelli said yesterday, they give the possibility of imagine the birth of a real Italian Silicon Valley.
Chiplets, we remember, are a new concept in the field of semiconductors. It’s about “chips within chips”, in essence, elements that contain different processors within them, each specialized in specific tasks (for example a processor for artificial intelligence, combined with one for calculation and one for graphics) interconnected with high-speed communication lines.
Chiplets, unlike SoCs, are easily modulated because each processor can be combined with others depending on the customer’s needs. In addition to this they offer low consumption and flexibility in applications.
Currently all the major players in electronics are thinking about chiplets, from Intel to IBM, from Nvidia to AMD, but The pioneer of this technology is Sehat Sutardja who had illustrated his vision in this field many years ago.
With his wife Weili Dai, husband and wife, he first founded Marvell Technology and then with the entrepreneur Byung Moon Han, former executive of Jcet, gave birth to Silicon Box which deals specifically with Chiplets. A plant dedicated to producing chiplets has been opened in Singapore but the Italian one It will be much larger: 600,000 square meters of occupied space versus 73,000. The scenario foresees that processors from various suppliers will arrive in Novara.
The components are cut and assembled into chiplets to create “supercomponents” that respond to the Artificial Intelligence market and provide customers in the automotive, home electronics and wearables fields.
As mentioned, Novara from this point of view, located halfway between Turin and Milan, home to the two most important Italian polytechnics, in the centre of the corridor that goes from Kiev to Lisbon, on the Genoa-Rotterdam axis, already the base of an enormous number of logistics companies, free from geological and hydrographic risks (a fundamental factor when talking about sophisticated and high-precision equipment), The ideal place appeared at Silicon Box.
Ideally around the company’s Singapore plant more semiconductor companies, customers, partners and suppliers should emerge, to give rise to what has the potential to become if not the Italian Silicon Valley mentioned by the minister and the president of the Piedmont regional council, certainly an important hub for the development of technology at Italian levelsacting as a spark for that always desired but not yet materialized transformative process of our industry.
The Silicon Box plant is in an advanced planning stage. Its construction is expected to begin as soon as the European Union gives the go-ahead for government funding. The prospect is to start production at the beginning of 2028 when
