Politecnico di Torino

The European Union, through the European Chips Act, aims to strengthen domestic semiconductor production capacity, but real sovereignty in an industrial sector is achieved through supremacy and control over design.

Filed in Italian · English published by the European Commission

Great idea, but as usual the money is wasted by distributing it mostly to tons of small companies that exist only to suck up EU money, big companies that exist only to employ Europeans and kick the can around, plus the few usual suspects in academia. And Italy pays Italian partners years after the project has started, sometimes even years after the project has ended.

I have been working in the field of digital integrated circuits since 1999. Much of the work carried out by myself and by my research group has been possible thanks to the Europractice initiative, which has provided access to professional design tools and semiconductor technologies. More recently, with support from the PNRR and CHIPS-IT, we successfully completed a RISC-Vbased tapeout in October 2025.

The effort of Chips Act 2 should focus not only on semiconductor production capability but also on reinvigorating the design capability. This requires an effort towards younger generations (high-schoolers and below) to promote the profession of integrated circuit (IC) designer so that they enroll in the right courses at university level and learn how to design a chip.

Based on my experience in research and innovation on advanced materials, I would like to highlight several priority areas: 1) Strengthening EU Academic Institution: Based on my academic experience, I would suggest as a priority to reinforce the operational capacity of EU academic institutions, which are increasingly affected by recurring funding cuts.

Europe has strong scientific and technological capabilities, but these do not always translate rapidly enough into innovation and market impact. The challenge is therefore not only to generate excellent research and technologies, but also to better connect capabilities and resources already available across Europe.

Politecnico di Torino welcomes the initiative and its source-to-sea integration with the Ocean strategy. We also share the diagnosis: the problem is less a shortage of solutions than the fragmentation of EU water R&I and the gap between pilot and deployment. See details in the attached file.

Politecnico di Torino welcomes the European Commissions initiative to develop an integrated European Ocean and Water Research and Innovation Strategy. From the perspective of marine renewable energy and offshore testing infrastructures, the contribution identifies six priorities to reduce fragmentation, strengthen implementation capacity and accelerate the transition from research to industrial deployment.

I am writing this letter as a researcher on material and mechanics related topics. I am strongly involved in the applications of the results of the research I, and my research group, deal with. I am writing this letter following the discussion on White Paper On options for enhancing support for research and development involving technologies with dual-use potential We strongly ask to amend the discussed document for…

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