Driving a European supply chain for World IoT Day
In an uncertain global economy, focus is shifting to a European supply chain for the Internet of Things (IoT).
On World IoT Day, the ability to mitigate the ‘crazy times’ with local production, from solar cells and batteries to chips and boards, is increasingly important.
Companies such as Epishine in Sweden and Dracula Technologies in France are providing new ways of producing solar cells and batteries in Europe. At the same time board makers such as Raspberry Pi and Tria Technologies have European production to provide local supply.
“While the early days of IoT hype were filled with lots of weird and wonderful ideas, the market is becoming more pragmatic now and we’re seeing investment in solid use cases like ultra-high efficiency production lines and low latency building automation,” Daniel Denzler, Senior Director, Business Line Management for Boards and Systems at Tria Technologies tells eeNews Europe.
“AI is also reinvigorating IoT, which puts pressure on Edge devices where a constant tether to servers for AI processing is impossible or impractical. So, OEMs are looking at ways to run productive AI applications at the Edge, or near the Edge, mainly focusing on speed, energy efficiency and ease of deployment of AI models.”
“Europe is in a very weak position. ST and Infineon have fabs and there are smaller fabs, but the majority of devices are fabbed outside the EU and that could cause problems For example Nordic Semi is leading the field but all the devices are produced outside the EU as far as I know and this could prove to be a very tricky bottleneck,” says Dr Shahram Mossayebi, CEO of embedded security developer CryptoQuantique in the UK.
For chips, the 22FDX low power process at Global Foundries in Dresden, Germany, is a key technology, and the FAMES pilot line will provide 10nm and 7nm versions of this technology in Europe, while, in time, the German fab for TSMC, ESMC, should provide sovereign supply for microcontrollers from partners NXP and Infineon. There is even the opportunity to build the latest chips on a 3nm process in Ireland with Intel Foundry.
Epishine is aiming for mass production of its indoor solar cells, while Dracula is inkjet printing both the Layer solar cells and the Layer Vault batteries that store the energy for IoT applications.
This is being driven by EU regulations, says Dracula CEO, Brice Cruchon. “Our products are part of the response to regulations aimed at eliminating the use of non-rechargeable batteries in IoT devices by 2027,” he tells eeNews Europe.
”This addresses the challenge of European sovereignty for energy production and storage. The ability to use organic polymers addresses both economic and environmental challenges, since organic polymer-based modules are recyclable. Today, we can easily source the materials, or these raw materials are used in other industries. We consume very little material to make our modules (less than 1g of material/m²). Above all, we formulate our own inks,” said Cruchon.
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Europe excels in energy harvesting and power management chips through companies such as e-peas in Belgium and Nanopower in Norway. E-peas has branched out from its energy harvesting management chips to a low power microcontroller for IoT designs.
“While we are using UMC fab in Taiwan, it is clear that a European value chain is important for Europe as a whole to have the complete capabilities from design to chip, and for smaller companies to have a local ecosystem to build on,” says Nanopower in Norway which is looking to develop a chipscale power management part.
“Distance and geopolitical risk are issues that we need to face daily. We have been fortunate to work closely with Imec in Belgium, who are helping us manage the supply chain and fab/packaging interface in Taiwan. It would have been very challenging as a small company to set up the complete supply chain otherwise.”
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“We’ve seen customers looking to make embedded IoT for their products simpler and more reliable. That means a shift to standardized communication platforms (like Matter) and a shift from proprietary embedded compute to more standardized compute module designs and with a standardized approach, especially to security needs,” said Denzler at Tria.
“This is driven by wanting to speed up development times and save on costs of building complex products, whilst managing complexity in long-term support. Thus, cost and time to entry are lower, so more businesses are beginning to bring IoT solutions to market in their industries, and this is driving growth. Very small embedded compute standards like OSM are making it easy to embed standard compute configurations for IoT into smaller or more creatively shaped devices.”
“We’re seeing mainly growth in edge devices, especially with the growth of OSM as a new compute standard and OEMs realizing they don’t need to spend a huge amount of R&D time and money on building an IoT-capable product from scratch.”
But the software is also vital. Agents in the software can track the performance of IoT devices, highlighting problems quickly.
“As IoT systems increasingly rely on edge AI and other advanced technologies, the complexity of the embedded software running on deployed devices is growing rapidly. This makes continuous visibility – not just during development, but throughout the entire device lifecycle – absolutely essential,” says Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO of Percepio.
“This is especially critical for autonomous devices expected to operate reliably for years without intervention. Europe is taking a clear lead in shaping regulations for cyber resilience and digital trust. This provides software observability solutions that not only support regulatory compliance but also empower device makers to build safer, more reliable, and future-ready products.”
This also highlights the need for security, including Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
“The CRA for wireless devices is pushing all the vendors and software developers to do something, even if it is the smaller devices,” says Mossayebi at CryptoQuantique. “A lot of the time the hardware is bought from different vendors and that can be outside the EU but when it is assembled in the EU you have to write the embedded software and because of the CRA you need root of trust and write the software to take advantage of that security.”
“It’s the classic specialisation economy. Leave the challenging problems to the experts. This will happen with IoT security and our hardware and software is well positioned.”
The company works with GF in Dresden and done multiple projects with the 22nm process and the sovereign supply chain is essential. “From a business point of view you look at the cost/benefit, but with the geopolitics and the value and the risk to the broader economy we need to build a level of certainty and access and control which hedges any crazy thing that might happen. We can’t ignore TSMC and US fabs and it would cost a great deal to bring everything into the EU but I would build a hedge for crazy times.”
www.triatechnologies.com; www.percepio.com; www.cryptoquantique.com; www.dracula-technolgies.com; www.epishine.com; www.nanopower.com; www.e-peas.com
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