Article – French language
L’UE appelle à la création d’un « Airbus des puces » | Le Monde Informatique (France)
My Comments
The European Union does play host to some electro-technical activity, whether in the form of research or design and manufacture of finished product. Think of names like Philips, Pace (set-top box applications), Loewe, B&O, Nokia and Siemens amongst many others when it comes to finished applications. Or you may think of Acorn who has built up the ARM microarchitecture used in most smartphones and tablets or B&O who have built up the ICEPower reference design for high-quality Class-D switching power amplifiers. As far as semiconductors and microelectronics are concerned, STMicroelectronics is the only European representative in the 10 main semiconductor companies.
But there has been a call for the European Union to strengthen a European-grown microelectronics industry. They effectively want to see a “digital Airbus” or “Airbus for semiconductors”. This is where Airbus, the France-based European aerospace name, has become associated with building the impressive airliners like the A380 superjumbo and been in a position to challenge established players like he US-based Boeing.
Here, the European Commission wants to launch an industrial plan to seed the European semiconductor industry by making Europe financially attractive to invest in for this industry. This encompasses the research and development aspect; as well as production of the components; and they want the European Union and its constituent Member States to work together on this.
What I see of this is that the European “finished-products” names could move towards the local “Airbus for semiconductors” once they see that the products can work well with their finished-product designs. Similarly, if this company can answer established firms like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA for CPU or graphics-processor designs, this could be a chance for Europe to facilitate a lively competitive microprocessor market.
