European Union Seeking to Strengthen Semiconductor Ecosystem

The U.S. Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) on June 8th, a major step forward in providing support and financial investment in furthering the United States' competitive capabilities in technology, including semiconductor capabilities. The USICA is bipartisan legislation intended to give federal funding to key science and technology areas, including STEM research, technology transfer, semiconductor research and manufacturing, as well as NASA research activities. The bill also seeks to establish a framework for agencies including the NSF and DOE to collaborate in these areas, to help ensure U.S. leadership in science and technology.

The European Processor Initiative (EPI) recently announced that it had released its European Processors Accelerator Chip (EPAC1.0) test chip design to a semiconductor maker for fabrication. The chip consists of multiple accelerator options including a vector processing unit, a stencil and tensor accelerator, and a variable precision processor, along with supporting RISC-V cores and memory access hardware. The 25 mm2 chip will be manufactured by US-based semiconductor maker Global Foundries using their low-voltage, low-power, 22 nanometer, 22FDX process platform.