Legal Framework
Joint Undertakings Under Horizon Europe
Council Regulation (EU) 2021/2085 establishing the Joint Undertakings under Horizon Europe, as amended by Council Regulation (EU) 2023/1782 of 25 July 2023 as regards the Chips Joint Undertaking, (‘Single Basic Act’);
Horizon Europe
Regulation (EU) 2021/695 of The European Parliament and of The Council of 28 April 2021 establishing Horizon Europe;
Digital Europe
Regulation (EU) 2021/694 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2021 establishing the Digital Europe Programme;
Financial Rules
Decision GB 2021.02, Annex 12, adopting the Chips JU Financial Rules;
Missing link
The Chips Act and the Chips for Europe Initiative Actions
The Chips JU is responsible for implementing a significant part of the European Chips Act.
Following adoption of the Chips Act in 2023 and the subsequent amendment of the SBA renaming and providing a new mandate for the Joint Undertaking, the Chips JU has started to implement most of the Chips for Europe actions in 2024, with the selection of applications and negotiations for the first four Pilot Lines and the launch of the fifth Call for Pilot Line and the Call for Design Platform.
The Pilot Lines’ Hosting Agreements and Joint Procurement Agreements entailed negotiating and signing new legal frameworks never implemented before, with a new funding programme (DEP) and with challenges as hosting, acquisition and co-ownership obligations. For the Design Platform, the Chips JU started preparing the documents for the launch of the Call for Tenders of the Central Cloud Infrastructure and Services that is expected to be launched in 2025. Additionally, in 2024, restrictions of participation to certain calls started to be implemented as per Articles 22(5) of the HE Regulation and 12(6) of the DEP Regulation.
Back Office Arrangements (BOA) implementation
The Back Office arrangements (hereinafter ‘BOA’) foreseen in the SBA continue being implemented in 2024.
The following BOAs were already implemented at the beginning of 2024, with the corresponding Service Level Agreements Signed:
- BOA HR; - BOA Procurement; - BOA Accounting.
In 2024 the implementation of the BOA IT has been launched with the Service Level Agreement approved in November (more details in section 2.6 on IT and logistics).
In the context of BOA procurement, the Chips JU has acted as the lead contracting authority and as participating contracting authorities in inter-JU procurement procedures to enhance coordination.
Legal-Governance
The Governing Board and Public Authorities Board have continuously enabled the Joint Undertaking to perform its actions by adopting relevant decisions. The main examples of this are the Governing Board decisions amending the Multiannual Work Programme’s appendixes for 2024 actions and to add appendixes to the year 2025 or the Public Authorities Board decisions related to the launch of the calls and to the selection of proposals.
Data protection
A new Data Protection Officer was appointed on 12 March 2024 for a mandate of 5 years, in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data (the ‘EU-DPR’). The Data Protection Officer has overviewed the compliance with the EU-DPR and any other task entrusted by means of Article 45 of the EU-DPR. Through the BOA Procurement and with the lead of SESAR JU, five new Framework Contracts related to Data Protection services have been signed and entered into force in September 2024.
Three contracts in cascade have been signed for LOT 1 - Operational support to data protection activities and two contracts in cascade have been signed for LOT 2 - Specialized Legal services on Data Protection. The Chips JU has started discussions with the contractor for LOT 1 with the aim of signing a specific contract for a Gap Analysis and subsequent training in 2025.
Further, the EDCTP 3 Global Health JU will lead the signature of an Inter-JU Specific Contract for the performance of a Data Protection Impact Assessment (‘DPIA’) on Different Microsoft Assets (including the new Microsoft Artificial Intelligence tool CoPilot). Signature of the contract is expected in the first half of 2025.
In the last quarter of 2024, due to the increased importance of the security and confidentiality of the documents that the Chips JU handles and the risk of cyber-attacks, the Data Protection Officer has also started collaborating with the IT team to increase the security of documents in SharePoint as a document management system, together with the IT Managed Services provider.
