Europe is angling for its slice of the Internet of Things with a new program that aims to help regional, often small players participate in the megatrend it believes is re-shaping electronics. EuroCPS will provide as many as 30 teams up to 150,000 euros each in funding and design assistance, the latest of a handful of programs under a $25 million, three-year initiative.

The program will put out its first call for proposals in April. It will initially select 13 proposals, providing people with ideas resources such as access to platforms and university researchers in the field of cyber-physical systems.

“Today the game is changing because electronics is less driven by scaling and more by apps like smartwatches or other wearables that require low power CMOS and other technologies,” said Olivier Thomas, a project manager at the CEA-Leti research institute who heads up EuroCPS.

“Access to technology is clearly the first problem” in IoT design today, said Thomas. “If you are small or a new entrant and don’t require high volumes it is extremely difficult to get access to the technologies…[Vendors] prefer to work with someone who will make a million devices a year, but if you just want 10,000 it becomes a nightmare,” he said.

The €9.2 million EuroCPS project is open to people from any European Commission country with ideas related to any field. “The goal is to use the wave of IoT to increase electronics production and competitiveness in Europe,” Thomas said.

EuroCPS is one of four programs under the European Commission’s €25 million Smart-Anything-Everywhere initiative that likely will extend beyond its initial three-year reach. They aim to spawn as many as 100 projects with 200 participants across the region.

A network of eight industrial and academic labs across Europe will provide design support for EuroCPS. Vendors contributing development boards and software include:

•An avionics board from Thales

•A connectivity board from Schneider

•STM32F boards and related process, packaging and software from STMicroelectronics

•A power management board from Infineon

•Intel’s Quark-based Gallileo board

The European effort has its counterparts around the world, including a smart-cities initiative in the US. But a growing set of IoT hardware accelerators tied to crowd-funding Web sites promise to be even bigger accelerators of IoT.