The Catalan government awards the engineering project for Catalonia's first chip center

BarcelonaA new step towards Catalonia having a chip development and prototyping center. The Catalan government has awarded the contract for drafting the basic engineering project for the construction of Innofab, a project resulting from collaboration between the Spanish and Catalan governments, to the IDP group, part of Bureau Veritas, for €2.6 million. The proposal, which must be submitted in April 2026, will be the starting point for developing the detailed engineering design and the subsequent construction project, which is expected to be awarded in the summer of 2026. Innofab will be Catalonia's leading chip center and will be located in the Parc de l'Alba, in close collaboration with the synchrotron, in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès. It will represent an investment of €400 million, part of which will be financed with resources from the Next Generation EU funds. It falls within the framework of the PERTE (strategic project) for the chip and the European Chips Act. These are two European initiatives that seek to strengthen European technological autonomy, one of Brussels' priorities.

The new center will have three buildings: the FAB (10,600 square meters distributed over four floors), another for offices and laboratories (7,300 square meters), and an auxiliary services building (4,000 square meters). In total, a constructed area of approximately 22,000 square meters. It will also have a cleanroom of more than 2,000 square meters from which chip manufacturing processes can be scaled up to an industrial level.

According to government sources, the goal is to make Innofab "a key scientific and technological infrastructure for the development of semiconductors and, together with the Alba Synchrotron and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, position Catalonia among the 50 most innovative regions in the European Union." The Innofab Foundation's board of trustees is made up of the Ministers of Research and Universities, Economy and Finance, Presidency, and Business and Labor, Núria Montserrat, Alicia Romero, Albert Dalmau, and Miquel Sàmper, respectively; as well as three individuals of recognized prestige in the field of research nominated by the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, which has thus far led the project's technical coordination. Innofab is part of the Catalunya Lidera plan, designed by the government of Salvador Illa "to consolidate Catalonia as a European benchmark in technological and industrial innovation, with a special emphasis on the semiconductor sector." Along with Innofab, the plan includes two other projects: DARE, led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which will develop technology based on the open RISC-V architecture for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications; and PIXEurope, coordinated by the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), to consolidate European leadership in integrated photonic circuits, with applications in strategic sectors such as telecommunications and healthcare. The project originated from a collaboration between the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Pere Aragonès, who was President of the Generalitat of Catalonia at the end of 2023. Subsequently, the current head of the Catalan government, Salvador Illa, continued and consolidated the project.