Nestled in the foothills of the French Alps, Grenoble feels more like a skiing base camp than the centre of one of Europe's hottest technology clusters. But the message at Semicon Europa, a recent industry shindig in the city, was clear. Europe may no longer be a force in mass chipmak-ing but it is poised for a comeback thanks to its strength in technologies well suited to a new world of interconnected objects and ultra-low power consumption. This is more than wishful thinking, though, so far, it is hard to spot in the numbers. Gone are the 1990s when Europe produced 15% or more of the world's chips. Firms headquartered in Europe now account for only 8-9% of global semiconductor revenues, which hit $315 billion in 2013 according to Gartner, a market-research firm (see chart). Microprocessors and memory chips are mass-produced mainly in Asia and America these days; the cost of building a "fab", as chip-fabrication factories are called, is too high for all but the largest-scale endeavours.
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