Quintauris, the European start-up that cuts the cost of microchips

To become a global platform for the standardisation - and thus the industrial application and commercialisation - of Risc-V, an 'open source' microprocessor technology, born in 2010 at the University of Berkley and destined to gain more and more ground in this strategic sector for the evolution of the world economy, as an alternative to the technologies prevailing on the market today (in particular, those developed by the Japanese company Arm), which are reliable and consolidated, but also subject to very expensive licences for the companies that have to use them and, in fact, in the hands of an oligopoly that - at a time of growing geopolitical tensions and new protectionism - risks putting Europe in the corner in the competition that sees the United States and China as protagonists.

It is with this ambitious and visionary mission that the Munich-based start-up Quintauris, founded in December 2023 by the five main European semiconductor players (Infineon, Bosch, Nxp Semiconductors, Nordic Semiconductors and STMicroelectronics), plus the American Qualcomm Technologies, was born. It could have a very important impact on the European and in particular the Italian industry, which is increasingly dependent on the microprocessor market. "We are a unique reality in this sector, precisely because of the participation and collaboration of these players,' explains CEO Alexander Kocher, an Austrian with a past as a manager in the automation and automotive industry, called upon to lead the start-up. 'Our goal is to take this open architecture, Risc-V, and create a standard infrastructure, aligned and applicable to industry products, and therefore marketable. This will be followed by a certification path, which is necessary for industry products, especially automotive products.

This first year has served to build up the team that will coordinate the work of the start-up, which is based in Munich, but which sees itself as a European project, with collaborators all over the continent, including Italy, with the aim of becoming a leader in the Risc-V technology segment, which is estimated to capture 25% of the microprocessor market share by 2030, with an expected growth of 47%.

"We will present the first results of our work next year,' Kocher adds. 'We have started working on applications for the automotive sector, given the importance of this sector for the European economy and also because a large part of our investors' business concerns this area, but in the future we intend to expand to other sectors, such as mobile telephony and ICT. With the clarification that Quintauris has no factories: it does not produce wafers or other silicon products, but 'we design and create the environment to build silicon-based products, as our shareholders already do using ARM technology. We produce the technology, the architecture, the instruction set for the microprocessors,' Kocher points out. Who underlines Quintauris' role within the EU strategy of developing a European microchip industry, competitive with the American and Chinese ones, also through the Chips Act, which allocates 43 billion euros of investment for this purpose.

In this scenario, Italy also plays its part: 'There are universities, such as Bologna, that are very advanced in research on Risc-V,' explains Kocher, 'and we are making contact with some Italian researchers. But that's not all: as Giovanni Notarnicola, a partner at Porsche Consulting who is following Quintauris's strategic and growth plan, explains, our country will have a significant impact from the German start-up's activities: 'First of all, an indirect impact, since one of the main items of our economy is linked to the automotive sector, which will be increasingly dependent on the chip market, as we know. Being able to have semiconductors at a significantly lower cost, because they are based on an open architecture, will be a great advantage for the companies that use them'.