Panel “Scaling-up Europe’s fabless ecosystem"
Speaker
Fabrizio Del Maffeo
Fabrizio Del Maffeo is co-founder and CEO of Axelera AI, a company based in Eindhoven that develops AI acceleration technology for edge computing. Before Axelera AI, he was Head of AI at the Bitfury Group. He was also Vice President and Managing Director of AAEON Technology Europe, the AI and IoT computing arm of the ASUS Group. In 2025, The Software Report named him one of its top 25 AI executives.
Philippe Notton
Philippe Notton is founder and CEO of SiPearl, which he created in 2019 with EU support to develop high-performance, energy-efficient European processors. In 2017 he joined Atos and helped launch the European Processor Initiative (EPI). Before that, he worked at STMicroelectronics, Thomson, Canal+, LSI Logic and MStar Semiconductor, in France, the UK and the US. At STMicroelectronics he led a division of about 2,400 engineers. He is a Supélec engineer and holds an Executive MBA from ESSEC and Mannheim.
Khaled Malej
Khaled Maalej is co-founder and CEO of VSORA, a Paris-based deep-tech company that designs high-performance AI inference chips. He is a French engineer and entrepreneur. Earlier in his career he held roles at several semiconductor companies. He then founded DiBcom, which was later acquired. He graduated from École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris.
Moderator
Marco Ceccarelli
Marco Ceccarelli is Programme Officer for the Microelectronics and Photonics Industry at the European Commission. He works on EU semiconductor industrial policy, with a focus on chip design and AI compute. He helped draft and negotiate the European Chips Act and now supports putting it into practice. He joined the Commission in 2017. Before that, he held managerial roles at Philips in the Netherlands and executive positions at high-tech SMEs, and he started his career as a research scientist. He holds an engineering degree in electronics from the University of Florence and an Executive MBA from ESSEC.