Where semicon meets telecom: the race to standardize

At High Tech Campus Eindhoven, a closing panel wrestled with a simple question with complicated answers: where do semiconductors and telecom meet? The discussion, hosted by Anke Kuiper (Ecosystem Services), brought together Leo Warmerdam (Executive Director, Holland High Tech), Jacob Groote (EVP Innovations & Partnerships, KPN), Erik Wilbrink (CEO, Bruco), and Ivan Stojanovic (Domain Manager Semicon, NXTGEN). Their verdict: the overlap is everywhere—and the stakes are high.

“We see a strong interdependence between the chip sector and the telecom sector,” Warmerdam opened. “Whether it’s in the radio, the backhaul, the core, or the device, it’s almost everywhere.” That’s why he also chairs the Future Network Services Advisory Board: “We push to connect 6G development with the Dutch chip sector. That’s how you generate more value from subsidies and the PhDs working on this.”

The technical agenda is as unforgiving as it is exciting. Demand for throughput (“more video, higher resolution, more devices”) is colliding with energy and thermal limits. “How do we miniaturize and deal with the heat that’s generated?” Warmerdam asked. One obvious lever is photonics. “If we can get rid of all these transitions between electrons and photons, we save a lot. But you need dedicated environments and chipsets - high reliability, high throughput - and hopefully less energy used.”

Security first, then everything else

Bruco’s Wilbrink argued that the central theme of this decade isn’t simply performance: “Security is absolutely crucial.” From RF to analog to mixed-signal ASICs, his customers’ chips sit inside communications, robotics, and autonomous systems vulnerable to “jamming, spoofing, hacking.” The examples are no longer hypothetical. “We’ve seen drones forced down because they’re jammed; planes landing while GPS is spoofed. High security is one of the main trends for this decade in both telecoms and semiconductors.”

Stojanovic agreed and pointed to concrete work underway. “We’re developing a program with Germany focused on quantum communication and quantum encryption,” he said, describing a cross-border testbed to bring next-gen secure technologies closer to end users, not just the hyperscale data centers. “We need to bring these things faster and closer to the customer… so the data in my home is secure and fast.”

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Talent, housing, and the geography of growth

Wilbrink offered a counter-narrative to the familiar Brainport talent squeeze. Bruco designs custom chips from the east of the Netherlands and, he said, doesn’t struggle to hire. “We have a strong culture where people study in the east and remain there. Housing is affordable, people can build a life, and that’s an excellent base to grow a company and keep talent on board.”

Warmerdam applauded the success but pushed for scale. The Netherlands, he warned, “plays above its weight in semiconductors,” but there is “no guarantee for success in the next ten years.” Dutch champions inevitably play a global game, he said. The challenge is to maintain sufficient momentum and capability anchored locally, day in and day out.

“Standard semicon? Game over.” Or is it?

Wilbrink didn’t mince words on manufacturing: “The semicon manufacturing industry is dead in the Netherlands; game over.” Strengths remain in equipment (think ASML) and in design, he said, but the climate for turning IP into scale-ups is weak. “If we choose smartly - photonics, quantum - we can still lead and build new fabs or businesses. But in standard semicon, we design on mature processes for customers. It’s important, but not highly innovative technology.”

From a telecom vantage point, KPN’s Groote rejected doom. The sector operates according to global standards; when Dutch chip design can codevelop and embed features into those standards, “there is enough value to be created.” The route to impact starts with use cases: “It doesn’t start with interesting technology. Bringing 6G to healthcare, for instance, that’s the basis for standards and what needs to be in the chipsets. Then you can globalize it.”

Killer apps, heterogeneous integration—then anchor it here

Stojanovic’s recipe: pick “killer applications,” combine Dutch photonic platforms (Eindhoven, Twente) with electronics via heterogeneous integration, and build the value chain around them. “If we can package, integrate, and deliver photonic chips to customers who need them, the business will flourish here. However, we then need to anchor it. We’ve failed in the past by chasing short-term benefits. This time we need bigger, longer-horizon public-private investments.”

That puts policymakers and investors in a difficult position. “Governments need to step up beyond four-year cycles,” Stojanovic said. Venture capital and public entities, such as competence centers, must also lean in. Warmerdam nodded to the upside: government understands the sector’s value; some segments are going “bonanza,” buying time to optimize from a position of strength, especially at crossovers like semicon × photonics × quantum.

Geopolitics, standards, and AI at the edge

Asked for the single biggest threat, Groote didn’t hesitate: bifurcated global standards. “If China, Europe, and the U.S. diverge, we’re dead. You’d be swapping phones at the border again.” The opportunity? AI inside the network. Training may live in hyperscale U.S. data centers, “but inference will happen close to the device; not on the device, but in smaller, dedicated edge data centers.” That demands new chipsets and architectures tuned for networked AI workloads.

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Wilbrink’s threat is the energy spiral. “It’s all cloud and AI: data-hungry, energy-hungry. We need solutions in architecture: chiplets, reversible computing, non-Von Neumann… If we don’t tackle heat and energy, the whole game blows up.”

The public’s questions: IP theft and consumer privacy

From the floor, a small entrepreneur with “45 worldwide patents” described a grim tour of global supply chains and unpaid royalties. Stojanovic empathized but argued for self-sufficiency in standards and becoming “unsurpassable” in critical elements: “We need to keep working until we are the standard.”

Another audience member asked about privacy from providers, not just attackers. Groote’s answer was direct: “Cybersecurity is extremely important for us.” He pointed to existing consumer controls in KPN’s app and invited visitors to the Security Operations Center to see the scale of attacks the network repels “per second.”

So, where do they meet?

Everywhere, and in the Netherlands, they meet in specific strengths: RF and analog design, millimeter-wave expertise, photonics platforms, and an ecosystem that is practiced in cross-sector collaboration. To convert this into a durable advantage, the panelists converged on a playbook: start with applications, embed Dutch ideas in global standards, tackle energy and security head-on, and anchor new value chains, especially where photonics and electronics intersect.