Open-source hardware as the backbone of a new semiconductor era
Open-source hardware innovation in Europe is the collaborative design, sharing, and reuse of chips, boards, and tools that lower development costs, speed up prototyping, and enable more engineers, startups, and researchers to enter advanced semiconductor and quantum technology development. This shift replaces closed, proprietary stacks with shared building blocks, allowing open embedded systems to grow across education, industry, and research labs. Red Pitaya’s open instrumentation platform shows how this approach works in practice, with engineers using the same board for signal processing, photonics, and quantum experiments. In parallel, processor IP companies such as Cortus push open-standard RISC-V architectures into industrial IoT and AI infrastructure, widening access to efficient compute. Combined with community-driven tools like KiCad and open nRF52840 boards, these efforts are forming a distributed yet coherent European deep-tech strategy focused on technological independence and faster innovation cycles.
Red Pitaya: Open instruments for deep-tech and quantum labs
Red Pitaya started with a clear aim: to make advanced test-and-measurement equipment accessible to more engineers and students through an open, reprogrammable platform. Its STEMlab 125-14 PRO Gen 2 board is used in engineering education, embedded systems, photonics, and increasingly in quantum technology development, where flexible signal generation and acquisition are vital. The company’s CEO, Mateja Lampe Rupnik, links this openness directly to Europe’s deep-tech competitiveness, arguing that shared platforms shorten learning curves and turn laboratories into innovation hubs instead of isolated silos. Because the same hardware can run software-defined instruments, RF experiments, and quantum control prototypes, teams can move from classroom exercises to research-grade setups with minimal friction. That model aligns with a broader European deep-tech strategy: open-source collaboration lowers barriers to entry, while local ecosystems build expertise around shared, upgradeable hardware rather than one-off, proprietary boxes.
Cortus and RISC-V: Open ISAs for Europe’s semiconductor future
Cortus brings a complementary perspective from the processor side, where RISC-V semiconductor Europe initiatives are reshaping how IP is created and shared. Michael Chapman, President and CEO of Cortus, has worked across automotive microcontrollers, CAN technology, and system-level tools, and helped found the company in 2005 to improve efficiency in embedded systems. According to eeNews Europe, Cortus technology “has been incorporated into more than 18 billion devices worldwide, with current production running at around 1.2 billion units annually.” As an original founding member of the RISC-V Foundation, and the only non-American organization at the time, Cortus saw early that open-standard ISAs could counter the dominance of proprietary architectures from players such as Intel and ARM. Today, its RISC-V portfolio targets automotive, avionics, space, nuclear, and AI applications, aiming to give European designers energy-efficient compute without surrendering control over core architectures.
From KiCad to CoffeeCaller: Democratising open embedded systems design
While Red Pitaya and Cortus work at instrumentation and processor levels, projects such as CoffeeCaller show how open embedded systems design is spreading through grassroots engineering communities. Built around Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52840 SoC, CoffeeCaller evolved from an office gadget into a compact development board with buttons, LEDs, a buzzer, sensors, Qwiic, NFC, USB-C power, and exposed I/O. Its public hardware repository includes KiCad schematic and PCB sources and is released under the CERN-OHL-S-2.0 licence, making the design inspectable, modifiable, and reproducible. The Elektor Engineering Insights session with developer Andreas Kurz focuses not on the SoC spec sheet, but on practical details: board shape, component placement, revisions, and documentation. This emphasis on reproducible design turns KiCad files into a learning tool and a template for other projects, reinforcing a culture in which European engineers treat open-source hardware innovation as a shared, evolving library rather than fixed products.
An open European deep-tech strategy for AI and quantum
Taken together, these efforts hint at a coherent European deep-tech strategy built on open collaboration instead of closed monopolies. On the hardware side, RISC-V gives designers a neutral ISA for AI accelerators, industrial IoT nodes, and edge computing, while platforms such as Red Pitaya supply affordable, reprogrammable test and control hardware that can serve both classical and quantum experiments. At the board level, open designs based on nRF52840 and KiCad reduce entry barriers for embedded developers, students, and makers, turning one-off prototypes into community tools. This ecosystem shortens innovation cycles: software, firmware, and hardware can evolve in lockstep, with improvements shared across many projects. In quantum technology development and AI infrastructure alike, that openness promises more resilient supply chains and broader participation, positioning Europe not just as a consumer of semiconductors but as a creator of the tools and standards that define the field.
