Chips – Image © Andrew Barker – Fotolia
(BRUSSELS) – The European Commission proposed Tuesday a comprehensive package it says will ensure the EU’s security of supply, resilience and technological leadership in semiconductor technology.
Global semiconductors shortages have been a big problem recently, forcing factory closures in a wide range of sectors from cars to healthcare devices. In the car sector, for example, production in some EU Member States decreased by one third in 2021.
This has made more evident an extreme global dependency of the semiconductor value chain, as well as illustrating the importance of semiconductors for European industry.
“The European Chips Act can be a game changer for our global competitiveness,” said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “In the short term, it will increase our resilience to future crises, by enabling us to anticipate and avoid supply chain disruptions. And in the mid-term, it will help make Europe an industrial leader in this strategic market. With the European Chips Act, we are putting out the investments and the strategy.”
The EU executive hopes the Chips Act will ensure that the EU has the tools, skills and technological capabilities ‘to become a leader in this field beyond research and technology in design, manufacturing and packaging of advanced chips, to secure its supply of semiconductors and to reduce its dependencies’.
The main components are a Chips for Europe Initiative, a new framework to ensure security of supply, a Chips Fund to facilitate access to finance, a coordination mechanism between the Member States and the Commission for monitoring the supply of semiconductors, estimating demand and anticipating the shortages.
Together with the Chips Act, the Commission is publishing a targeted stakeholder survey in order to gather detailed information on current as well as future chip and wafer demand.
Also today, the Commission and the European Investment Bank group signed a joint statement on boosting investments in semiconductors in the context of the Chips Act package, which is available online.
European Chips Act - guide
