Brussels, 23/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 23 May, the European Commission presented its new European strategy for the electronics industry. It hopes that this will provide a tool for generating €1.5 billion in investments, slightly more than €10 billion over seven years in the high growth micro- and nano-electronics sectors. This strategy ultimately aims to provide a lever for obtaining investment of €100 billion by 2020. Commissioner Neelie Kroes (Digital Agenda) explained: “I want to double our chip production to around 20% of global production”.
This new strategy could be approved by the end of the year by the Council of the EU and European Parliament. The strategy aims to unite the different national strategies currently in place, the only merit of which, according to one European source, has been to attempt to protect an electronics industrial base in Europe. According to the Commission, this base should now provide a means for launching an offensive approach. If a European regulation is adopted on public-private partnerships in June, the way will be opened up to putting in place one of the key elements of the strategy in 2014 - raising €10 billion. This envelope will be made up of €5 billion in private funds and €5 billion from public money, including around €1.6 billion from the next “Horizon 2020” research and innovation framework programme.
As indicated by the Commission, “the strategy will be based around three major complementary pillars: reducing the cost of microchips (transition to silicium microchips of 450 mm, the material the first chips were made from), speeding up their production (“More Moore”) and making them smarter (“More than Moore”)”. At the same time, the Commission is proposing to enhance cooperation of the three most important world-class electronics clusters: Dresden (Germany), Eindhoven (Netherlands)-Leuven (Belgium), and Grenoble (France) and connecting with other leading edge European clusters such as in Cambridge (UK), Carinthia (Austria), Dublin (Ireland) and Milan (Italy).
These two micro- and nano-technology sectors employ around 200,000 people in Europe and account for 10% of the global market. Since 2000, these two sectors have enjoyed stable GDP growth of 5%, a trend that is rather unusual in the current context. Kroes has constantly underlined the fact that, despite being niche sectors, the benefits they generate are also felt in other sectors, “from communications to health, energy and transport, all the challenges of our society will be able to use and benefit from electronic innovation”. (JK/transl.fl)