Can investment from TSMC, Infineon and others revive Europe's chip dreams?

DRESDEN, Germany/TAIPEI -- For over three decades, Dresden has been at the heart of European chipmaking, and for most of that time, Jens Drews has had a front-row seat to the ebbs and flows of the industry.

In 1996, he watched as Advanced Micro Devices of the U.S. took farmland in the eastern German city, known for its baroque architecture and nicknamed the "Florence on the Elbe," and built a sprawling clean room to produce processor chips for computers.