by Paolo Azzoni
On 20 and 21 February 2024, the ECS Brokerage Event returned to Hotel Le Plaza, Brussels. In bringing together the members of the three industry associations – AENEAS, EPoSS and INSIDE – this annual gathering connects the ECS community and sets the ball rolling on proposals and consortia that will mould the contours of European research and development. As one of the most consistently highly rated events of the three associations, this gives participants the opportunity both to address a full audience in SME and project pitches and to build bridges in face-to-face meetings. In short, this is where the seeds are planted to shape our technological future.
The state of play
This year’s Brokerage was particularly noteworthy as the first to take place since the launch of the Chips Joint Undertaking (JU). This serves as the implementing vehicle for the Chips for Europe Initiative, which will support technological capacity building and innovation by bridging the gap between the European Union’s advanced research and innovation capabilities and its industrial exploitation. The Chips JU does not replace the Key Digital Technologies JU, as is sometimes mistakenly believed, but retains and extend its topics and objectives while adopting a name more recognisably related to the explosive demand for semiconductor technology and the recent chips shortage, both of which have highlighted Europe’s lack of market share and autonomy in this domain.
The projects generated by the Brokerage Event therefore fall under the Chips JU Calls 2024. As a result, opening speaker Lucilla Sioli, Director for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Industry at the European Commission, wasted no time in addressing the current state of play: on 1 December 2023, the first calls on the initiative’s four pilot lines were launched to the tune of €3.3 billion, while €5.75 billion in investment in infrastructure is expected by 2027.
The correct approach
In her speech, Sioli also took the opportunity to highlight the bottom-up and bottomdown nature of the Chips JU and thus the Brokerage, whereby support is given to R&D activities decided by participants while important focus topics are defined by the Commission, member states, public authorities and industry associations. “One of these is automotive,” Sioli noted. “If you look at the evolution of the automotive industry towards automated driving, it is essential to think of the electronics part of the car and it is also important to make sure that it works with the software part. We are concerned that the electronic side will end up depending completely on chips and other components from other regions in the world. This is a very strong sector that we have in the European Union, so we are trying to work with the different tiers of the automotive industry to see if we can, for example, invest in inspired architecture.”
As a possible implementation roadmap for an automotive hardware platform via the Chips Act, her example included support not just for hardware like chips and cores but also for the software stack of the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) initiative that aims to create standardised software building blocks and interfaces in the vehicle and at its edge. Such a dual approach, including by the SDV, has been highlighted in articles across previous editions of the INSIDE Magazine; we are therefore pleased that the Brokerage Event marked the first announcement by the European Commission that this support for both hardware and software is the correct approach to vertical application.
Reaching wider
This was far from the only interesting information to emerge in these early sessions: Patrick Cogez, Technical Director of AENEAS, also presented the first look at detailed data from behind the scenes of the updated ECS-SRIA website. The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, created by the three associations to determine challenges and industry objectives, societal benefits and strategic advantages for Europe, has achieved excellent results in terms of readership. As Cogez’ overview revealed, the ECS-SRIA was accessed over 48,000 times in the last year alone, including visitors from 110 countries and with near parity in gender. Notably, the number of visits and users were equally distributed across the main sections (foundational technology layers, cross-sectional technologies and ECS key application areas), suggesting purposeful and in-depth readership – including from outside of the world of technology, with 30-40% of users reported to be interested in economy, business and/or politics.
The capacity for the ECS-SRIA to reach beyond its existing audience is especially pertinent to the Brokerage, which is open to all interested parties and not just members of the associations. The event is therefore often the entry point for newcomers to the ECS community and allows the ecosystem to be continually renewed with fresh ideas and expertise. With this in mind, association directors Paolo Azzoni, Caroline Bedran and Elisabeth Steimetz collectively outlined the role of the industry associations as private members in the Chips JU, as well as the services they offer. These include representing the interests of their members in the Chips JU Governing Board, advocating for attractive content and funding conditions in calls, proposing and discussing the aforementioned focus topics, and organising, in addition to the Brokerage itself, workshops and a yearly stakeholders’ forum.
At this year’s Brokerage, the benefits of such membership were amply demonstrated – among other ways – through the awarding of the 2024 RIAs Challenge winners. Organised by INSIDE in the context of the European initiative EUCEI, this highlighted four research and innovation action (RIA) projects with strong results and exploitation opportunities in the Edge to Cloud Continuum. Given the associations’ services in networking and consortia building, the challenge forms part of a wider effort to build up an ecosystem among European industries involved in edge, IoT and cloud technologies and applications. More information and interviews with this year’s winners can be found in a dedicated article in this magazine.
Cycle of success
For the three associations, the key advantage of one shared Brokerage is bringing people together from their different communities and beyond, through which projects are generated that are far more varied in scope than one association alone could hope to achieve. The benefit of such an approach was on full display in the poster presentations, stretching across multiple rooms of Hotel La Plaza and providing information on 48 future project proposals.
Many of them were seeded in Brokerages gone by, largely thanks to dedicated sessions in which projects can be presented to potential partners. On the afternoon of the first day, dozens of projects were pitched on a wealth of topics, ranging from autonomous machinery, AI chiplets and quantum design automation to wearable ultrasound patches, digital democracy and the minimisation of waste in the food supply. At this year’s event, 16 SMEs also pitched themselves, encompassing anywhere from ten to a thousand employees and demonstrating a wide geographical spread across Europe, such as established powerhouses like France and growing innovation centres like Slovenia. Each year, both sets of pitches are facilitated by the dedicated ECS Collaboration Tool, which allows users to initiate projects, invite partners and search for both.
Overarching ambitions
As always, the second day of the Brokerage was more informal, featuring only a speech on the 2023 and 2024 Chips JU Initiative calls before leaving participants to bilaterally build up consortia on the basis of the first day. While recognising the successes of the Brokerage Event, we remain mindful of our commitment to delivering the latest and most relevant information to attendees. We therefore acknowledge that the final presentation by the Chips JU was intended also for participants from outside of the community who may be less intimately familiar with it. With the aforementioned name change from Key Digital Technologies to Chips JU, for example, repeating information can be a means of avoiding further confusion.
Nonetheless, the final session contained a number of new elements for even the most dedicated attendees, including a more detailed motivation of the Chips for Europe pilot lines by demonstrating their intersection with the initiative’s proposed design platform and competence centres, as well as the mutual exchange between the initiative, users and suppliers and the industrial uptake of technologies developed. The overarching ambition is to provide start-ups, SMEs and other users with a design environment similar to what is expected at larger companies.
As the Chips JU gets fully underway, we expect such efforts to have an increasingly large impact on the ease of running effective projects and on the results achieved. We very much look forward to seeing which projects emerge from this year’s gathering and we hope to meet you again at the ECS Brokerage Event 2025, where we will continue to promote our members’ interests and help push Europe into a leading position in intelligent digital systems.
Download ISSUE 7 of INSIDE Magazine via this link: https://www.inside-association.eu/publications
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