Slovenia will establish a competence centre for advanced semiconductor technologies, the main purpose of which will be education, research, and development as well as prototype and pilot production. The competence centre will be a one-stop shop for providing expertise, integration and support related to crisps and semiconductor technologies, an experimental and pilot environment, best practises, and other activities that will enable stakeholders to develop state-of-the-art niche technologies and products.

The design and manufacture of integrated circuits, also known as a microchip or IC, has a long tradition in Slovenia, dating back to 1969, when the first integrated circuits with a small number of transistors appeared on the market. At that time, the Laboratory of Microelectronics was established at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Ljubljana, where a number of ICs were developed for the needs of Slovenian industry, including the chip for the first smart card in cooperation with American Microsystems (AMS), the first microcomputer to be integrated into advanced white goods devices, small telephone exchanges and ATMs. This tradition continues in the Slovenian universities, institutes, and industry. Today, many innovative Slovenian solutions can be found in consumer products: RFID badges and readers, circuits for contactless transactions in NFC smartphones, counters and encoders in automated factories, electronic semiconductor components and much more.

The design and manufacture of microchips requires in-depth knowledge of electrical engineering with a focus on electronics, microelectronic technologies, statistics, physics, computer science, signal processing, materials engineering, microwaves, and other specific fields. As in other fields, there are new developments practically every day, whether due to the introduction of new design methods, new technologies and materials or due to ever new customer and user requirements for which integrated circuits must be designed and manufactured.

In Slovenia, we have a high level of expertise, as demonstrated by the microchips we have already designed and built, and which are in use all over the world. In the field of research, the focus is on the design, manufacture and testing of terahertz sensor systems for use in security devices for detecting dangerous objects, identifying potentially dangerous or harmful molecules in the air or detecting explosives and drugs, detecting and diagnosing cancer in medicine, developing integrated circuits for use in positron emission tomography, for biometric applications and for use in space, where special attention must be paid to radiation protection. In addition to integrated electronic circuits, research is also being carried out in the field of integrated photonic circuits, which are now an indispensable component in data centres (integrated transmitters) and whose use is expanding to various areas of sensor technology (biomedicine, LIDAR), artificial intelligence and quantum technologies.

Integrated circuits design is also carried out by Slovenian engineers, master and PhD students from technical faculties in the R&D departments of the international companies STMicroelectronics (smart cards, contactless payments, RFID badges and readers), Renishaw, and Aviat Networks, as well as in the Slovenian companies RLS Merilna tehnika (ICs for magnetic displacement and rotation measurements), Skylabs (ICs for space applications), Beyond Semiconductor,  Optomotive and others. Integrated circuits are being developed to such an extent that they can be manufactured in companies specialising in chip production.

The industrial production of semiconductor circuits is carried out on a large scale at German owned Diotec in Trbovlje, where diodes and rectifier bridges are manufactured. The company carries out all technological steps from the raw silicon wafer to the final product ready for sale.