He recalls the same arguement was under way with Cees Krijsman, Philips, Jurgen Knorr, Siemens and the irrepressible Pasquale Pistorio of ST some 25 years ago.

The result was a series of EU programmes from Jessi through Medea, Eniac to Catrene which funded Crolle, boosted Imec, and allowed Infineon to nurse the 200mm to 300mm wafer justification transition.

Today? Well Infineon gave up. NXP pulled out of Crolles. Qinetiq firmly closed Malvern. But Manners argues that Philips' collaboration with Taiwan and the set up of TSMC was beneficial both to an natioanl economy and profitable to the company.

If ST and EC could set up a fab giving guaranteed low cost, easy access to advanced manufacturing processes for Euope's design houses and fabless companies, it could give Europe just such a similar boost, he urges.

Difficult not to agree. You might as well ask if European Grids, HPC  and Cloud Computing are feasible? It  involves heavy hardware investment, expensive data warehouse storage and considerable software development expenditure, for often not apparently too many jobs being created.

But you won't see Europe or the UK leaving Cloud computing or HPC and grid developments entirely to American and Asian interests. Grid and HPC are worth their weight in gold to hard science, and Cloud is starting to seem to be key to shouldering the whole future of  continuously emerging software upgrades, with some very real value to the use of Software as a Service.

Europe needs both fabs and clouds.