Four years after it was approved, PERTE Chip has closed its Next Generation cycle with around 20% of its budget spent. The headline figure invites a harsh reading, but the real balance is more nuanced. Spain now has something it lacked in 2022: a stronger ecosystem of chip design, photonics, research and talent, with results that are already tangible.
Writing in bit, the magazine of Spain’s official association of telecommunications engineers (COIT), Fran Alcalá, CEO of Celestia Chip, examines what the largest of Spain’s PERTE programmes has delivered. The advanced-node fab meant to anchor the plan never materialised, and he sets out solid reasons not to read that as a loss. What did prove costly was time: calls that took months to resolve and left only weeks to deliver, and guarantee requirements that pushed out precisely the smaller firms the programme set out to support.
The challenge now is continuity. Without stable, predictable funding, the initiatives launched over the past few years risk stalling. The article points to three levers: long-term commitment to European programmes, public procurement of innovation so the state becomes an early customer for chips designed in Spain, and priority support for the startups, SMEs and midcaps that build design teams and hire new graduates. In his words, what is missing is not capability, but continuity.
Read the full article (in Spanish) in bit: https://bit.coit.es/perte-chip-y-ahora-que/