The trends of 2025 on eeNews Europe
With Europe finishing 2025 looking at the next iteration of its semiconductor CHIPs Act, the year has been focussed significantly on sovereignty, security and sustainability for the region.
From AI to quantum, from medical electronics to satellite communications networks and the circular economy, the most popular articles on eeNews Europe this year have shown the areas of interest for engineers in the region.
Supply chain in Europe
Back in July, Ebon Upton, CEO and founder of Raspberry Pi and Nick Russel of RAM Innovations talked about the challenges of ensuring the electronics supply chain in Europe is secure and sustainable, as well as the impact of the war in Ukraine.
The wide-ranging discussion also included some details on the latest re-spin of the RP2350 microcontroller to support 5V operation in more rugged industrial applications.
A more connected world for the Internet of Things (IoT) is developing with non-terrestrial networks (NTN). A host of new satellite networks are in development for narrowband-IoT, but testing is a key challenge, as we explore in NTN NB-IoT for a truly connected world.
Recycling of electronics is also increasingly important for future-proofing designs. Contract manufacturers are finding new ways to recycle equipment for a more sustainable, cost effective supply chain, while new materials are making it easier to recover components from boards at the end of the useful life.
Reshoring is once again at the forefront due to protectionism in the form of tariffs and geopolitics forcing organisations to consider manufacturing in the region to ensure a sovereign supply despite having meagre manufacturing resources that have been hollowed out over decades.
The uncertainty caused by sudden tariffs has led to a re-evaluation of where to prioritise reshoring manufacturing and whether this is even possible. For many industries, it will simply be too expensive unless prices rise significantly, driving up inflation. Whole ecosystems have developed in low cost countries that cannot be reversed quickly without economic dislocation.
The cost of automation is paramount in deciding whether high-wage countries can bring production back and mitigate labour costs. The availability of sufficient resources and skills is also key. Other important aspects include the cost of input materials for local manufacturing, the regulatory environment and the availability of parts and technology needed to produce products cost-effectively. In the United States, tariffs will ironically increase the cost of many input materials for local manufacturing.
Smart factories are adopting robotics and automation software and systems to deliver reconfigurable, fully automated factories and supply chains with minimal labour requirements to address current skills shortages in manufacturing and logistics.
Reshoring driven by tariffs and sovereign concerns requires the cost of automation and robotics to decrease to a level that makes economic sense. The use of physical, analytical, and generative AI will expand, enabling robots to perform a wide range of tasks more efficiently.
Analytical AI, for example, allows robots to process and analyse considerable amounts of sensor data for managing variability and unpredictability in high-mix and low-volume production, as well as in public settings.
Physical AI enables robots to train themselves in virtual environments and operate based on experience rather than programming. Generative AI will permit robots to integrate seamlessly into human environments and query information for maintenance, servicing, and operational procedures.
Although humanoid robots are currently limited to performing single-purpose tasks in industrial manufacturing, there is potential for humanoid robots in logistics and warehousing, especially if issues related to cost and complexity can be resolved. Predictions of hundreds of millions of humanoid robots in the next couple of decades have spurred significant investment in companies such as Figure raising $1bn to scale up production this year.
Quantum technology is a key area of innovation for the region, and the Quantum Act being prepared by the European Commission for the middle of 2026.
During her confirmation hearing before the European Parliament last year, Henna Virkkunen, the Commissioner-designate for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, emphasized the critical role of quantum technologies in bolstering Europe’s technological independence and competitiveness. She highlighted that while Europe possesses top-tier quantum researchers and research, the market remains fragmented due to different national strategies.
To address this, Virkkunen has proposed developing a comprehensive EU quantum strategy, aimed at unifying efforts, pooling resources, and coordinating investments across member states. With consultations through the summer, the initiative seeks to position Europe as a global leader in quantum innovation, ensuring strategic autonomy for the region.
This will see a €50m quantum design facility with six quantum chip pilot lines as well as the Quantum Europe Research and Innovation Initiative and a pilot facility for the European Quantum Internet as well as developing a Quantum Technology Roadmap in Space with the European Space Agency and contributing to the European Armament Technological Roadmap.
However with the act not expected until the middle of the year, the region faces being left behind by the same bureaucracy that has plagued the semiconductor Chips Act.
Europe is also strong in medical electronics, and our overview of the latest developments in the area looked at the latest sensor technologies, from graphene transistors to LEDs and metasurfaces.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) came into force earlier this year to make embedded systems more secure, with significant impact on the design process in a number of ways. We covered what embedded developers need to know about the CRA as well as industry support from companies such as Rutronik.
And of course AI is a major influence on the semiconductor and electronics industry, from the chips for training and inference to the server boards and inference at the edge. One key challenge is the power consumption of the racks in the datacentre, or AI factory, as Nvidia calls it. A new architecture for powering the current generation of Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) used for both training and inference with 800V distribution can allow more devices in a standard datacentre rack at 100kW, while the next generation Rubin GPU will need to handle almost 1MW of power.
Then there is AI inference at the edge of the network. The latest Astra SL2610 AI edge processor from Synaptics has 1TOPS of performance and a wide rang of open source tools so that developers are not beholden to proprietary compilers and tooling from a large silicon vendor anymore. A combination of a scalable, power-efficient AI architecture with open source tooling is set to be disruptive for the Internet of Things.
From security to quantum to AI, 2025 has seen a resurgence of the importance of semiconductors across many different industries. 2026 is set to take these trends and boost the impact.
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