PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL: A semiconductor fab, described as the first of its kind in Latin America, has been opened in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil.

The politicians who spoke at the inauguration of the fab – set up by Brazil’s government-funded semiconductor startup Ceitec SA – announced that the efforts to set up semiconductor manufacturing facilities is a strategically crucial step to help Brazil become a bigger industrial power, in addition to the country’s dependence on export of its abundant supply of raw materials.

According to them, even as Brazil wants to attract more multinational companies to the country to set up fabs and other electronics-manufacturing plants, the country needed its own IC companies in order to facilitate development of the supplier infrastructure and also to encourage Brazilian engineers based abroad to return to their homeland.

Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, said that Ceitec SA will help reverse the “inferiority complex” that gripped a whole generation of Brazilians in the 1980s, when many people in Brazil assumed that good-quality electronics products had to be manufacture overseas. 

Brazil once had, the President added, a competitive microelectronics industry, which had to be disassembled in the 1980s because of opposition to government-supported business. As a rule, he explained, the government does not favour creating nationalized businesses, but the government has to do so in cases where the private sector will not or cannot.