The Rise of Egypt’s Semiconductor Industry (Part I)

It was January 1994. Ayman Ahmed climbed three flights of stairs in Heliopolis and pushed open the door to find his new office had no desks. A few rickety chairs. A light bulb dangling from the ceiling. And one Unix workstation so massive, a bulky Sun clone with a 24-inch CRT monitor, so colossal that the team had turned its shipping box into a desk.

Dr. Hisham Haddara, then a young professor of electronics, had convinced a French technology company to set up a branch office in Egypt only a few months prior during the summer of 1993. That company was Anacad (short for “Analog CAD”), a maker of software tools for chip designers. Haddara’s pitch was that Egypt had bright engineering talent that could meaningfully contribute to Anacad’s R&D, if given the chance. Against the odds, the company agreed to give it a try. They shipped over one Unix workstation – the crown jewel of that barren office – and tasked Haddara with hiring a team.

One of the first hires was Ayman Ahmed, fresh out of Ain Shams University. He nearly missed the opportunity – by late 1994 he was unemployed, having quit a “lousy” job and contemplating grad school abroad. A classmate tipped him off that “some French company” was hiring. Ahmed’s interview took place not in a corporate boardroom, but in a university lab. The interviewer was Dr. Hisham Haddara himself – one of Ahmed’s favourite professors from undergrad, known for his passionate explanations of semiconductor physics. The interview lasted 15 minutes. Haddara asked if Ahmed was ready for a mentally stimulating challenge; Ahmed answered with an enthusiastic yes, caring little about salary (which came to a humble 350 Egyptian pounds a month). He was in.

On his first day, Ayman was greeted by Haddara and two other young engineers – “the three musketeers,” as he later called them. Sherif (a quiet former classmate of Ayman) and Maged (a slightly older Cairo University grad) made up the rest of the team.

Inside, the place was almost comically makeshift. “There was nothing. It was an empty apartment… a few old chairs… even the lights were just a bulb hanging from the ceiling,” Ayman recalls. They literally built their office by hand: scavenging wood to fashion desks, installing light fixtures themselves, even fixing the plumbing when the toilet broke. “I would go and fix it. I don’t care. We needed to make it work,” Ayman says of those scrappy early days.

Despite the spartan setup, an almost missionary zeal drove the team. Dr. Haddara – whom Ayman affectionately calls “the godfather of the industry” – had a vision far bigger than making a quick profit. “We’re not doing this for the money,” Haddara would tell them. “We want to set an example and stimulate the whole community”. His mission was nation-building through technology. Every hire had to be top-notch; every project had to be executed with excellence and integrity. Money was secondary to proving what Egyptians could do on the world stage. This ethos of purpose over profit became the cultural bedrock of Egypt’s semiconductor sector.

Equally important was the cultural context that supplied this little office with talent. In Egypt, engineering is a prestige profession, often on par with medicine and ahead of law in the hierarchy of respected careers. This is a legacy of the 1950s–60s, when President Nasser’s push to industrialise (epitomised by the building of the Aswan High Dam) made engineering heroic in the public imagination. “They wanted the smartest to go to engineering school,” Ayman notes, explaining why, to this day, many of Egypt’s brightest teenagers choose electrical engineering over other fields.

By the 1990s, Egypt was graduating far more engineers than its nascent tech industry could absorb. Most ended up in traditional roles – government telecom jobs, maintaining telephone networks, or at best assembling TVs for foreign electronics brands. It was hardly cutting-edge work, and Ayman admits that when he graduated in 1994 the local electronics career prospects were “very boring” – essentially installing microwave links or fixing telephone exchanges. But this meant that a reservoir of under-utilised engineering talent existed, hungry for something more innovative. Haddara and his peers sought to channel that hunger into a new field – semiconductor design – and in doing so, transform a “barren landscape” into an ecosystem.

That first year at Anacad Egypt was intense. After a month of self-training on the new hardware description software (learning to “model” electronic circuits in code), the three young engineers were sent to Anacad’s headquarters in Ulm, Germany for two weeks of formal training. The trip was a revelation – it wasn’t Ayman’s first time abroad but it was for the other two musketeers, and he was by far the junior, a 20-year-old kid among older colleagues (he had entered university at age 15, so he was used to being the precocious “baby” of the group). 

Brimming with new knowledge and confidence from the German team’s praise (“we told you everything we know… you know everything now,” the trainers joked), the trio returned to Cairo to find that Haddara had acquired actual office furniture during their absence. Anacad Egypt was starting to look like a real office. They even hired a secretary.

What happened next would turn that tiny spark in Sun City into a steady flame. By 1995, Anacad (the French company) was struggling financially. In need of a lifeline, Anacad was acquired by…

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