The strategic partnership between Taiwan’s Egis Group and French chip design startup SiPearl on October 22 marks the first tangible outcome of the Taiwan–France Innovative R&D Collaboration Grant Program, according to officials from both countries who attended the signing ceremony.

Launched in 2025, the bilateral initiative is expanding its scope this year to include space technologies, smart technologies, smart manufacturing, advanced materials, biomedical sciences, and green energy, with the aim of accelerating cross-border technological innovation and industrial collaboration.

Taiwan’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Ming-hsin Kung, said the program supported six joint projects in 2025, generating more than NT$1.2 billion in R&D investment.

"Through cooperation across key sectors such as advanced packaging, silicon photonics, AI data centers, and satellite supply chains, both sides are steadily advancing technological research and development, industrial investment, and supply chain integration, underscoring a shared commitment between Taiwan and France toward high-value-added development and co-innovation," Kung said.

“Today’s agreement deepens collaboration between Taiwan and France in AI and advanced semiconductor technologies,” said Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Chih-chung Wu. “It reflects not only Egis Group’s global expansion ambitions, but also the immense potential of Taiwan-France synergies built on our complementary strengths.”

Speaking in Mandarin at the ceremony, Frédéric Laplanche, Director of the French Office in Taipei, noted, “Over the past three years, we have seen a significant acceleration in bilateral tech cooperation, highlighted by Foxconn’s two strategic investments in France, Quanta Computer’s investment in the French quantum company Pasqal, and ProLogium’s EV battery venture.”

From strategic investment to joint processor development

Egis Group, a global fabless semiconductor company specializing in semiconductor products, connectivity IP, and turnkey chiplet design services, announced its participation in SiPearl’s Series B funding round, taking a minority stake in the French chip designer.

Beyond the financial investment, the partnership establishes a technology collaboration between Egis subsidiary Alcor Micro Corp. and SiPearl to develop advanced processors for the HPC and AI data center markets.

Under the agreement, SiPearl will adopt Alcor Micro’s proprietary Arm-based Mobius 100 CPU chiplet platform for its second-generation processor, combining the Taiwanese company's hardware design technology with SiPearl's software capabilities.

SiPearl CEO Philippe Notton said the collaboration would extend beyond the second-generation processor, with plans to continue leveraging Egis Group’s technologies in the joint development of SiPearl’s third- and fourth-generation CPUs.

Taiwan moves up the semiconductor value chain through chiplet innovation

The partnership highlights an emerging dimension of Taiwan–France semiconductor cooperation: moving beyond traditional manufacturing and supply chain relationships toward joint development of advanced computing technologies.

For Taiwan, the agreement demonstrates how its semiconductor industry can expand its role in the global value chain by contributing proprietary CPU chiplet platforms and processor design expertise, rather than relying solely on its established strengths in foundry manufacturing and advanced packaging.

For France, the collaboration offers an opportunity to combine domestic processor development and software capabilities with Taiwan's semiconductor design expertise, potentially accelerating the development of competitive computing platforms for HPC and AI infrastructure.

As AI workloads drive demand for increasingly powerful and energy-efficient processors, chiplet-based architectures are emerging as an important approach to improving performance, scalability, and design flexibility.

By integrating Alcor Micro’s CPU chiplet platform with SiPearl’s processor development and software expertise, the partnership illustrates how cross-border technology collaboration could help both countries strengthen their positions in the evolving AI computing ecosystem.

More significantly, the agreement signals a potential shift in Taiwan–Europe semiconductor relations—from a predominantly manufacturing-centered partnership toward deeper co-innovation in processor architecture, chiplet technologies, and the computing platforms that will underpin next-generation AI infrastructure and sovereign AI initiatives.

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Uploaded by Ian Huang