The need for chips will skyrocket in the coming decade and experts are seeing opportunities for Estonian businesses in chip design and verification and the testing of the security of chips, according to a report by an Estonian think tank.
According to a report by the Foresight Centre, a parliamentary think tank, the global market volume of chips and embedded systems is estimated at about €550 billion and the sector is projected to increase to a trillion by 2030.
“It is not very likely that large chip plants will be set up in Estonia because this would involve large investment needs and high risk, but we have a potential in small and serial production of chips as well as in special solutions,” Uku Varblane, the head of research at the Foresight Centre, pointed out.
He noted that Estonia’s opportunities would be increased by a breakthrough in freeware chips as it was feasible for small companies to produce them.
The Foresight Centre points out that it is economically realistic for Estonia to fulfil certain stages in the production of novel high-temperature semiconductor devices – for example, base crystals.
Special solutions and small series
“As technologies become simpler, it will be possible to begin to offer special solutions and small series – large international chip plants do not produce small series,” Varblane said.
So far, the focus in the development of chip technologies has been on the development of smaller and cheaper chips and faster chips with lower energy consumption. In the opinion of the experts who participated in the study, constant development can be expected in chip technologies in the future as well, but not a revolution.
Chips find application in nearly all areas of life from security to health care, the growing need for chips is further driven by the green and digital transition. In connection with the increasing complexity of chips, they are more and more labour-intensive to develop and therefore a larger share of value creation has shifted from semiconductor production companies to their development companies. There are increasingly more companies in the sector who do not have their own production capacities.
The Foresight Centre is a think tank at the Estonian parliament that analyses socio-economic trends and builds future scenarios.
