Together we add up, divided we're just a fraction - Thomas Monk, Accelenation
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Single European chip company idea floated, torpedoed
AN IDEA to combine European chip makers St Microelectronics, Infineon and NXP in order to compete with Intel on scale has been put forward to the French government.
Joseph Borel, an ex-R&D VP with St Microelectronics told EEtimes that R&D costs and the move to sub-45nm scale production would leave European semiconductor makers unable to compete.
In a 12-page proposal, Borel said that the combined revenues of the three companies would reach around $26 billion, five billion below Intel’s revenues and that only by cutting duplication of effort could Europe hope to compete in the market in the future.
"We only need to have Nicolas [Sarkozy], Angela [Merkel], Giorgio [Napolitano] to take the right decision," he said of the presidents of France, Germany and Italy.
"This decision can come from neither the companies nor from the European authorities. The time of the Gauls or of the Romans is over. We should all start working together and establish a European champion."
However, analysts dismissed his ideas as old and never going to happen. Infineon CEO Wolfgang Ziebert was reported as saying "Today, synergies result mainly through R&D and not through manufacturing, as was the case in earlier times. " µ
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and what instruction set will this be using? Instruction set? What's that?
A bit like the idea to combine all of the car companies from a great manufacturing nation, including some of the greatest names in the history of motoring, into one single giant company that ended up being flogged for £10.
IIRC it took airbus 10 years after it was created to integrate its parts and that with constant interference from European national gov'ts and the EU. The most impressive thing about Airbus' marketing production jets was not their specs, but their mere existence in the face of the BS the company was subjected to. 

But, hey, it does take a decade to design and start shipping an airliner - lots of time for the politicos to do their thing.

Does anyone think this will work with a chip company? Let's see: the ALU and cache controller can be designed in England, the FP unit designed in Italy and onee built in each of Germany, Netherlands and Scotland, the cache built in Spain. Poland will hold out for at least 100k transistors of unspecified function.

The chip will be assembled, where else?, in France.

Did I forget something? Hmmm. Oh! The pins! Well, I suppose we can let the Serbs or Croats make the pins. They're good with pointy things.