Turkey's chip designers already work for several major semiconductor companies. Its only domestic fab still runs a 0.25 micron process (a late 1990s manufacturing node, generations behind the leading edge), and ÇAKIL, the country's first indigenous processor, was manufactured in…
Turkey's chip industry has a structural split that runs through the country's defense electronics, drone exports, and consumer-appliance supply chains. AnkaSys, an Istanbul design house, offers design and verification services and, according to EE Times, counts several major semiconductor companies among its customers. ElectraIC runs a functional-safety practice across avionics, rail, and automotive. ASELSAN, the defense prime, keeps a captive analog and RF design shop called MKR-IC and a packaging and test subsidiary called TÜYAR. Baykar designs flight-control computers for its drones in-house. A company founded by ex-ASELSAN and STMicroelectronics engineers has co-developed a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller with Beko that, according to EE Times, is targeting roughly 30 million units a year. None of it is fabricated in Turkey.
The country does have one domestic integrated-circuit line: YİTAL, a BİLGEM laboratory founded in 1983 under Turkey's scientific research agency TÜBİTAK. EE Times reports the line still runs a mature 0.25-micron process, a node suitable for defense ASICs and infrared detectors but generations behind the commercial leading edge. When Turkey wanted its first indigenous general-purpose processor, ÇAKIL, a RISC-V design (an open-instruction-set chip architecture) developed jointly by TÜBİTAK and ASELSAN, the country sent it to TSMC, where it was manufactured on a 65-nanometer process. A company founded by ex-ASELSAN and STMicroelectronics engineers' Beko microcontroller followed the same path.
That gap is the policy problem the government now says it intends to close. Turkey's HIT-30 high-tech incentive program, a multi-year industrial policy administered through the Ministry of Industry and Technology's call for projects, is the country's headline vehicle for fab investment. An EE Times analysis describes the spending as "billions" directed at domestic chip capacity, though the program's exact fab envelope and leading-edge node targets have not been independently disclosed in a primary government document. What is documented is that the design base has been operating for years without a domestic customer on the manufacturing side.
The geopolitical context makes that dependency harder to ignore. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western semiconductor export controls were among the first non-military tools deployed. In that sequence, chips acted as the opening instrument of pressure, not the closing one, and the precedent is the kind any mid-sized power with serious defense electronics reads as a warning. Turkey exports armed drones at scale, runs a defense prime whose captive silicon flows back to the same foreign fabs its civilian design houses use, and sits next to active conflicts. A design base that depends on someone else's lithography is not a capability so much as a lease.
There are two ways the policy can fail, and neither is dramatic enough to make the evening news. The first is the trailing-edge economics problem: sovereign fabs at mature nodes are expensive per wafer, the volumes rarely justify the capex, and subsidy-driven fab programs in the European Union, India, and the United States have generally struggled to deliver on their original timelines. The second is the slower bleed. Design engineers leave for higher-paying fab-adjacent markets in Taiwan, the Gulf, and Western Europe before any new Turkish line is qualified to receive their work.
The honest question is not whether Turkey can design chips, because it demonstrably does. It is whether the engineers who currently staff AnkaSys, ElectraIC, MKR-IC, and the company founded by ex-ASELSAN and STMicroelectronics engineers will still be in Ankara and Istanbul when a domestic fab is finally ready to run their tape-outs. HIT-30 commits the money. Turkey's industrial policy now has to commit the timeline.