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Lawmakers in Brussels this week backed separate bills that will allocate €43 billion to bolster Europe’s competitiveness and resilience in semiconductor technologies and applications, strengthen cybersecurity capabilities across EU member states, and regulate crypto asset markets.

A political deal paving the way for the formal adoption of the EU Chips Act was struck at a negotiation session between the EU’s main institutions on April 18. Chips are crucial to achieving both the digital and green transition and are strategic for key industrial value chains. Europe’s Chip Act, which aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act, addresses the fact that Europe’s share of the global microchips market is only 10%. Recent global semiconductor shortages forced factory closures in a range of sectors, from cars to healthcare devices, emphasizing the global dependency of the semiconductor value chain on a very limited number of actors in a complex geopolitical context.

Separately, in a week in which cyber criminals were accused of attacking U.S. and UK government agencies and the agency in charge of Europe’s air traffic control, the European Commission moved to shore up its cyber defenses with the EU Cyber Solidarity Act, a €1.1 billion plan that aims to strengthen cybersecurity capabilities across EU member states, creating a “European cybersecurity shield.”

Meanwhile, the European Parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly backed the European Union's first set of rules to regulate crypto asset markets. "This regulation brings a competitive advantage for the EU," Stefan Berger, the lawmaker who steered the rules through parliament, told Reuters “The European crypto-asset industry has regulatory clarity that does not exist in countries like the U.S."

Xenco Medical has pioneered a new category of surgical implant systems with sterile-packaged spinal implants preattached to disposable, composite polymer delivery instruments. Developed at the intersection of materials science and mechanical engineering, the highly reinforced, composite polymer instruments included with each of Xenco Medical’s implants are designed for both consistent mechanical performance and the elimination of the costly logistics associated with the sterilization process used by hospitals. They also help curb infections associated with re-using the same surgical instruments on multiple patients.

The invention of the disposable composite polymer model disrupted legacy metal-based spinal device and instrument manufacturers such as Stryker, Zimmer Biome and Medtronic.

But Xenco Medical didn’t stop there. It additionally disrupted delivery, setting up WiFi-enabled vending machines in hospitals for real-time inventory monitoring of its surgical implant systems. It has further transformed operating rooms by introducing the world’s first glasses-free holographic surgical simulation platform, enabling surgeons to translate two-dimensional datasets such as CT and MRI scans into interactive, holographic reconstructions on a light field display.

The San Diego, California-based company’s technology is now in use in 612 healthcare facilities across the United States and Latin America. To get where it is today the company, the winner of The World Economic Forum’s 2022 New Champions Award for Excellence in Sustainable Growth, had to overcome ergonomic and manufacturing challenges, navigate complex regulatory and technical landscapes, and surmount the skepticism of hospital administrators and surgeons.

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If Europe wants to stay apace in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, medical research, climate change mitigation and energy management it will need its own microprocessors to process huge volumes of sensitive data in a fraction of a second. That is where SiPearl, a French fabless chip startup, comes in. It is designing a low-power high performance computing (HPC) microprocessor with backdoor-free security to first power European supercomputers and later data centers and European-made autonomous vehicles, contributing to the technological sovereignty of the Continent.

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Size of a funding round announced this week by Cortical Labs. which is pioneering the new field of biological computing, also known as synthetic biological intelligence. The company, which was first profiled in The Innovator seven months ago, developed DishBrain, a system which exhibits natural intelligence by harnessing the inherent adaptive computation of neurons in a structured environment. In vitro neural networks grown from ethically sourced stem cells induced from adult cells are integrated with in silico computing via high-density multi-electrode array.

Integrating neurons into digital systems to leverage their innate intelligence enables performance that is not possible with silicon alone, along with providing insight into the cellular origin of intelligence, says the company.