TL;DR at the end of the 80's East Germany had paradoxically a more capable semiconductor industry than West Germany (not in terms of innovation, it trailed the state of the art by 5..10 years, but definitely in terms of scale), this was mainly because the Eastern Bloc was cut off from western microelectronics because of the COCOM embargo and had to bootstrap their own microelectronics industry, while Western Europe could just buy their chips on the world market from the cheapest bidder.

Those centers of technology with their attached universities were mainly located in Dresden (Robotron) and Jena (Carl Zeiss) and some smaller locations sprinkled over the southern half of East Germany.

This 'micro-electronics tradition' carried over into the 90's after the reunification and continues until the present time.