DigiFed: New European Project to Fast-Track Adoption Of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by SMEs

Lead by the Research institute of CEA Tech, Leti, the Horizon 2020 project brings together 12 European partners such as research institutes, universities and key members of the electronics-industry value chain including Zabala.

Digifed seeks to boost the adoption of advanced digital technologies, or cyber-physical systems (CPS), by EU SMEs with a focus on non-digital businesses. It will implement a business plan for the sustainability of the federation of hubs designated by the European Commission, while providing key support mechanisms for both individual companies and groups of SMEs to foster the introduction of digital technologies in their product-and-service offerings.

What are Digital Innovation Hubs?

Created in 2016, Digital Innovation Hubs – DIH are ecosystems of large industrial companies, SMEs, startups, researchers, accelerators, and investors whose aim is to create the best conditions for long-term business success for all involved.

Through its open calls, DigiFed will engage at least 200 European SMEs and midcaps in its innovation program. At least 80 of these will receive funding support and benefits from one of DigiFed’s innovation pathways and half of these will be businesses beginning their digital transformation.

“DigiFed will experiment with new innovation processes for the benefit of SMEs by creating and supporting alliances between large enterprises and innovative SMEs to boost their market outreach,” said Isabelle Chartier, project coordinator at CEA-Leti. “The project also will help create alliances between SMEs to demonstrate the potential of CPS digital technologies in hardware security, human-machine interaction, and autonomy. DigiFed targets cooperation among hubs across Europe to make those technologies and know-how available to all European SMEs.”

Coordinated by CEA-Leti, with Nanolec IRT, the three-year, €7.9 million project includes the companies AVL (Austria), BluMorpho (France), STMicroelectronics (France and Italy), and Zabala (Belgium); universities BME (Hungary), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), research center Digital Catapult (United Kingdom), and Ikerlan (Spain); and hub-focused entities Minalogic (France) and Steinbeis Innovation (Germany).

DigiFed, which leverages IRT Nanoelec and CEA-Leti’s expertise in hardware security and CPS, was launched in January 2020.