Route-to-Product

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The EU Chips Act represents something Europe’s corporates have not seen in decades:

• A coordinated industrial policy that combines funding, infrastructure, and talent into a single, unified semiconductor growth engine.
• A once-in-a-generation chance to leap ahead in first-of-a-kind technologies—before the market is saturated by global competitors.
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For Europe’s largest and most strategic companies, this is the moment to rethink how innovation happens.

The opportunity is huge, but so is the challenge. The semiconductor sector is now moving at a velocity measured in months, not years.

• AI workloads double in complexity in under 12 months.
• Automotive electronics platforms refresh in half the time they used to.
• Connectivity standards like 5G/6G evolve faster than the industry can build bespoke silicon for them.

This pace puts traditional corporate innovation models under pressure. Large organisations can no longer rely on long internal R&D cycles or closed-door strategies—they risk missing the window entirely.

In this new environment, transparency is not a nice-to-have—it’s a competitive weapon. Corporates need visibility into:

• The earliest stages of technology ideation, including university research and seed-stage startup IP.
• The readiness level of new chip architectures—both technically and commercially.
• How supply chains are evolving under sovereignty-driven industrial policy.
• The readiness level of new chip architectures, both technically and commercially.nto:

Without early access to these insights, corporates will enter too late, losing both the technical edge and the market narrative to more agile players.

This is where shift-left collaborative venturing—connected to the EU Chips Act platform—changes the game.

Shift-left means moving validation, optimisation, and integration as far forward in the development cycle as possible.

When corporates combine this with collaborative venturing—co-developing products with startups, research institutes, and ecosystem partners—they can:

• Evaluate new architectures pre-silicon through multi-physics digital twins, reducing risk before investing in tape-outs or manufacturing.
• Integrate startup innovation into corporate roadmaps in months rather than years.
• Validate power, performance, and manufacturability in a shared virtual environment—with results visible to partners, investors, and EU Chips Act funding bodies.

By bringing together the funding (via the EU Chips Act Fund), the infrastructure (via the EU Virtual Design Platform), and the validation tools (via multi-physics digital twins), corporates can shrink the path to value—moving from ideation to revenue much faster.

The EU Chips Act builds on an already strong but fragmented ecosystem. Some of the leading categories and players include:

EDA (Electronic Design Automation) – The Design Backbone

• Siemens EDA – Europe’s sovereign EDA leader, delivering the software and hardware platforms needed for chip design, verification, and system simulation.
• Cadence and Synopsys – global players with strong European customer bases, but non-sovereign.

IP Providers – The Building Blocks of Chips

• Arm (UK) – dominant in CPU architectures, essential for mobile, automotive, and embedded systems.
• Imagination Technologies (UK) – GPU and AI accelerator IP.
• Codasip (Czech Republic) – European leader in RISC-V processor IP.

Fabs & Manufacturing – From Prototype to Volume

• GlobalFoundries (Germany) – key European manufacturing site in Dresden.
• STMicroelectronics (France/Italy) – power electronics, automotive MCUs, sensors.
• Infineon (Germany) – automotive semiconductors, power devices.
• Intel (Ireland & Germany) – expanding European foundry capacity under the Chips Act framework.

• ASML (Netherlands) – world leader in photolithography equipment.
• Soitec (France) – advanced silicon-on-insulator wafers.
• imec (Belgium) – research powerhouse for semiconductor innovation.

The Chips Act is not just a funding opportunity—it’s a strategic invitation to innovate in a way Europe has never done before:

• Transparent access to the earliest ideas.
• Shared design and simulation infrastructure.
• Funding models that de-risk the riskiest stages.

Those who engage now—and embrace first-of-a-kind, shift-left, collaborative venturing—will define Europe’s semiconductor leadership for the next 20 years. Those who wait risk being on the outside, looking in.