Are there any companies in EU who are developing chips now? I only know ASML but that only makes the wafers.
I ask as I can't imagine the government doing this. So there must be some company behind this deal.
I ask as I can't imagine the government doing this. So there must be some company behind this deal.
The ASML litho machines are a single step in even just the wafer production process, there are several companies involved in making and processing masks, doing the etching, cleaning solutions, etc. As many industries, it's a highly globalized supply chain, with many companies distributed around the world specializing and leading different aspects. And yes, several of them are in the EU.
As to why the governments would do this, well it's geopolitics. The EU has some big players in the industry, but other parts of the supply chain are elsewhere. When all big geopolitical powers are interdependent, then no player will move to block another off at risk of hurting themselves. Now, both China and the US are shoveling billions into developing a higher independence (even before the trade war). Likely, the EU feels it is now forced to follow suit, or risk having e.g. the access to high-volume fabs to be a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations.
Not sure you would include foreign companies with plants in the EU. Nexperia, TI, GloFo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
Aside from that I'd expected chip designers like ARM (+licensees), Bull Atos (would you call that an OEM?) and related software companies to take part in this.
And these three are only the largest pure-semiconductor companies. There are many dozens of smaller companies and quite some fabs. A lot of automotive electronics is done by European companies. Also, many international semiconductor companies have development sites in Europe.
There are also some small companies focusing on photonics in NL, Smart Photonics is one of them for example.
I don't think they'll start a new ISA from scratch.
As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and processor push is very real now.
One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free market, no one would have been crazy enough to invest in it.
Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.
And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine without specialized medical care, so even if people could buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which most people in most of the world get from the state anyway.
- obscure software and programming paradigms/libraries
- one-off's
- projects that create only reports, papers and recommendations
- endless recreations of the same software over the years and decades
- plain dumb projects
- attempts at recreating other people's software (e.g. U.S.)
There is also a large amount of overlap in work/content between projects, and lots of time is appropriated for unrelated work e.g. employees working on their PhDs.
On the other hand the industry takes a lot more money and plays similar games.
Project partners do not take the right path, because it's not conducive to fulfilling a grant, getting the next grant or increasing your citation count. The incentives are wrong.