Infineon Technologies

Infineon markets semiconductors and systems for automotive, industrial, and multimarket sectors, as well as chip card and security products. Infineon has subsidiaries in the US in Milpitas, California, and in the Asia-Pacific region, in Singapore and Tokyo, Japan.

Infineon has a number of facilities in Europe, one in Dresden. Infineon's high power segment is in Warstein, Germany; Villach, Graz and Linz in Austria; Cegléd in Hungary; and Italy. It also runs R&D centers in France, Singapore, Romania, Taiwan, UK, Ukraine[4] and India, as well as fabrication units in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and China. There is also a Shared Service Center in Porto, Portugal.[5]

Infineon is listed in the DAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

In 2010, board member Klaus Wucherer was elected to step into the chairman's office upon the retirement of the then-current chairman Max Dietrich Kley following a proxy contest in advance of the shareholders' meeting.[6]

In 2023, it was Germany's largest chip manufacturer.[7]

As of 2011, Infineon comprised four business areas after several restructurings:[8]

In 2004, Infineon bought ADMtek .[12][13]

in 2006, the former Memory Products division was carved out as Infineon's subsidiary Qimonda AG, of which Infineon last held a little over three-quarters. At its height Qimonda employed about 13,500 people; it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange until it filed for bankruptcy with the district court in Munich in January 2009.[14]

In July 2009, Infineon agreed by contract with the U.S. investor Golden Gate Capital on the sale of its Wireline Communications for €250m.[15] The resulting company was named Lantiq and had around 1,000 employees.[29] Lantiq was acquired by Intel in 2015 for $345m (USD).[30]

In January 2011, the wireless business segment was sold to Intel for $1.4b (USD).[16] The resulting new company had approximately 3,500 employees and operated as Intel Mobile Communications (IMC).[17][18] The smartphone modem business of IMC was announced to be acquired by Apple Inc. in 2019.[31]

In August 2014 Infineon Technologies agreed to buy the International Rectifier Corporation (IR) for about $3b (USD),[19] one third by cash and two-thirds by credit line.[32] The acquisition of International Rectifier was officially closed on 13 January 2015.[33]

In July 2016, Infineon announced it agreed to buy the North Carolina-based company Wolfspeed from Cree Inc. for $850m (USD) in cash.[20] The deal was however stopped due to US security concerns.[21]

In October 2016, Infineon acquired the company Innoluce which has expertise in MEMS and LiDAR systems for use in autonomous cars. The MEMS lidar system can scan up to 5,000 data points a second with a range of 250 meters with an expected unit cost of $250 in mass production.[22][23]

In March 2018, Infineon Technologies AG sold its RF Power Business Unit to Cree Inc. for €345m.[24]

In June 2019, Infineon announced it would acquire Cypress Semiconductors for $9.4b (USD).[34][35] The acquisition closed on 17 April 2020.[25] The acquirement was completed in 2020.[3]

As of 2023 Infineon was planning to build two additional plants in Dresden for €5b, asking the government to subsidize it with 1b, financed through the €42b European Chips Act. It would employ 3000 people.[7]

In May 2023, Infineon acquired tiny machine learning company Imagimob, a Stockholm, Sweden based company with a platform for development and deployment of edge AI applications.[36]

In October 2023, Infineon completed the acquisition of GaN Systems (headquarter Ottawa, Canada).[28]

Currently the following persons are in the following positions[38]:

• Jochen Hanebeck (CEO)
• Helmut Gassel (CMO)
• Rutger Wijburg (COO)
• Constanze Hufenbecher (CDTO)
• Sven Schneider (CFO)

In 2004–2005, an investigation was carried out into a DRAM price fixing conspiracy during 1999–2002 that damaged competition and raised PC prices. As a result, Samsung paid a $300 million fine, Hynix paid $185 million, Infineon $160 million.[39][40]

In October 2017, it was reported that a flaw, dubbed ROCA, in a code library developed by Infineon, which had been in widespread use in security products such as smartcards and TPMs, enabled private keys to be inferred from public keys. As a result, all systems depending upon the privacy of such keys were vulnerable to compromise, such as identity theft or spoofing. Affected systems include 750,000 Estonian national ID cards, 300,000 Slovak national ID cards,[41] and computers that use Microsoft BitLocker drive encryption in conjunction with an affected TPM.[42] Microsoft released a patch that works around the flaw via Windows Update immediately after the disclosure.[43]