About

SwissChips is an inital three-year transitional measure jointly led by the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), EPFL and ETH, and funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), aimed to maintain and secure a strong position of Swiss researchers and research infrastructure in the strategically important areas of semiconductor technologies, microelectronics, and more specifically cutting-edge integrated circuit (IC) design within the European landscape. 

The increased focus on digital sovereignty was addressed recently by the EU Chips Act and the US CHIPS (short for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors”) act. It is now more important than ever to strengthen Switzerland's position to align with technology decoupling trends of leading economies (USA, China, India, and EU) and work towards ensuring Switzerland's digital sovereignty.

In addition, as IC design is evolving more rapidly than ever with growing complexity and costs of semiconductor technologies, the burden of access for state-of-the-art IC technology, even for manufacturing low-volume prototypes has dramatically increased. Significant technical know-how and deep engineering skills as well as a complex ecosystem of electronic design automation (EDA) tools are required as a prerequisite for effective research, innovation, and teaching: Designing advanced ICs today requires teams of significant size to manage the associated complexity.  SwissChips will also address these challenges by providing long-term support for education and innovation on IC design in Switzerland, with the long-term goal of democratizing IC design in Switzerland. 

As a transitional measure, SwissChips will allow Switzerland to not only keep pace, but to also foster it's position in semiconductor, microelectronics, and IC design research, innovation, development, and also businesses, helping to ensure access of Swiss research and academic institutions to advanced manufacturing and IC design technologies and to maintain and build a strong pool of talents and competencies in Switzerland.

In addition, SwissChips research and goals will be aligned with ongoing developments and programs in Europe, in order to 

• enable a seamless reintegration in the “EU-Family” of research programs, 
• foster the Swiss semiconductor, microelectronics, and IC design ecosystem, 
• develop strong synergies among research institutions, 
• develop a network with the Swiss stakeholders 

The infrastructure and technologies developed under SwissChips will benefit all Swiss stakeholders, and will be available to Swiss universities and universities of applied science.