Programme Category
Programme Name
Programme Description
The European Defence Fund (EDF) is the Commission’s initiative to support collaborative defence research and development, and to foster an innovative and competitive defence industrial base.
Identifier Code
Call
Summary
The goal of the topic is to create new types of processors for AI that offer very significant performance gains for defence applications, and to develop European supply chains offering a technological autonomy for these technologies.
Detailed Call Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important for most defence capabilities.
Moving from digital to analogue computing has the potential to improve computing in terms of speed and/or energy-efficiency by several orders of magnitude (expectedly by a factor of at least thousands). Furthermore, it can benefit from the increasing versatility of artificial neural networks to address a variety of AI applications. In addition, it offers enhanced security by coding the information in a way that strongly limits information leaks, as this information is deeply intertwined with the processing hardware. In addition, this is an emerging technological domain within the field of processors where competition is relatively open and where there is an opportunity to build on European competencies.
The proposals must address research on new hardware architectures for AI that offer very significant gains in term of power consumption, processing speed and latency, as well as in terms of size, weight and cost. Any type of architecture deemed suitable to address the objectives may be investigated (e.g. magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ), memristors, in-memory computing, etc., possibly combined with other relevant hardware and software technologies in hybrid architectures).
Call Total Budget
Thematic Categories
- Justice - Security
- Other Thematic Category
- Research, Technological Development and Innovation
Eligibility for Participation
- Central Government
- Other Beneficiaries
- Private Bodies
- Researchers/Research Centers/Institutions
- State-owned Enterprises
Eligibility For Participation Notes
Applications will only be considered eligible if their content corresponds wholly (or at least in part) to the topic description for which it is submitted.
In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
- be legal entities (public or private bodies)
- be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
- EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs)
- non-EU countries:
- listed EEA countries (‘EDF associated countries’, see list of participating countries)
- have their executive management structure established in eligible countries
- must not be subject to control by a non-associated third country or nonassociated third-country entity (unless they can provide guarantees – see Annex 2 – approved by the Member State or EDF associated country where they are established).
Consortium composition – For all topics under this call, including EDF-2023-RA-DIS-LDEW, proposals must be submitted by:
minimum 3 independent applicants (beneficiaries; not affiliated entities) from 3 different eligible countries.
Call Opening Date
Call Closing Date
National Contact Point(s)
Ministry of Defense
172-174 Strovolos Avenue, 2048 Strovolos, Nicosia,
website: https://mod.gov.cy/
Telephone: 22 807500
Email: defence@mod.gov.cy
Department of Research and Innovation
Phones: 22 807755, 22 807754
Email: research.innovation@mod.gov.cy
EU Contact Point
European Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DEFIS): https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/defence-industry-and-space_en
For help related to this call, please contact: DEFIS-EDF-PROPOSALS@ec.europa.eu