In the high-stakes game of semiconductors, Estonia has just placed a new, important bet. The country will launch of a new chip centre, backed by industry leaders. The €2.4M initiative—jointly funded by the EU’s Digital Europe program and Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs—brings together AS Metrosert, Enterprise Estonia, and the Estonian Electronics Industry Association in a strategic consortium.
While global semiconductor manufacturing is dominated by giants like Taiwan’s TSMC, South Korea’s Samsung, and America’s Intel, Estonia targets its own niche and capabilities. Rather than competing in mass production of standard processors, the centre will enable Estonian companies to design specialized, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) tailored to their unique products, ensuring strategic autonomy in core sectors. Manufacturing cutting-edge chips requires multi-billion-dollar fabrication plants, but designing specialized chips for particular applications can be done by smaller players. And Estonia does know its way around advanced electronics: the country exports over €180M worth of 5G technology base stations and components to the US alone.
The new centre will focus on three critical areas: hardware security, chip testing, and functional verification. It will utilize the partners’ access to grant opportunities, expertise and high-level networking. “If we want Estonia to develop competitive products and increase the share of high-tech industry, we need to build up companies’ competence in chip technology and provide them with the services they need. This is exactly what the chip centre will enable,” said Erkki Keldo, Minister of Economy and Industry.
And there’s more to it than just words. The initiative will recruit experts to provide consultancy and technical support to companies. Universities will partner with the centre to create courses for engineers interested in chip technology. The consortium plans to develop relationships within the chip industry and identify investment opportunities. Additionally, the centre will offer support for software and hardware capabilities and testing.
“Chip capability will provide Estonian technology companies, including the defence industry, with the tools to create more cost-effective electronic systems. This applies to product parameters such as performance, power consumption, security, dimensions, weight and, in the case of mass products, price. This is clearly a key and strategic know-how on which the technological sovereignty and competitiveness of each country is based,” said Jaan Raik, coordinator of the EIS Center for Chip Technologies and Design.
With the fast-growing Defence Tech sector, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and other industries, Estonia’s strategic chip initiative comes at an important time, aligning with broader EU efforts to reduce dependency on foreign manufacturers. If you want to learn more, contact the project coordinator, Jaan Raig ([email protected]), with any related questions.
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