Innovate UK’s Skills, Education, Manufacture Innovation for Semiconductors, (SEMIconductors) Programme will be launching a £12 million CR&D competition, which aims to support manufacturing scale-up across the UK semiconductor industry and supply chain.
We attended the pre-registration event in Newport, Wales on October 16th and have penned a few thoughts around how our existing alliance activities can provide a framework for a possible response to the tender.
The UK Semiconductor Strategy is clear that (a) academia and industry have a shared responsibility to help foster the ecosystem of talent and to train tomorrow’s innovators and need to develop closer ties (b) applied research should feed into demonstrable industrial success and (c) that specific new infrastructure and frameworks – such as Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT) and networking initiatives – may be needed in support. Arm agrees. We have invested in a set of interrelated projects and programs of direct relevance and are keen that these make an even greater contribution at national and global scale, as part of the UK’s wider Collaborative Research & Development (CR&D) approach.
Firstly, the Semiconductor Education Alliance provides us as a community with a scaleable platform to drive practical multi-partite action on the skills agenda. It can potentially anchor the UK at the centre of a vibrant ecosystem, whilst taking maximum advantage of our status as a globally-orientated alliance, and can provide a huge boost to CR&D proposals.
Secondly, we have already built proof-of-concept community of practice initiatives in both teaching and research that are gaining traction. These are hosted by the University of Southampton on open governance principles, again with the UK at the centre of an international constellation of talent. These cover IP and design, with the research community also being encouraged towards tapeout and manufacture through multi-project wafer (MPW) fabrication. Further investment could develop the initiatives to maturity and scale, whilst simultaneously leveraging the Alliance described above.
Thirdly, Arm has innovated its business model to enable academics to access commercially-proven technology at no cost and with minimal friction. The Arm Academic Access (AAA) programme now has more than 100 university institutional members with many more end-users undertaking research projects all over the world. AAA feeds the research community of practice above and licenses small-scale manufacturing. Furthermore, we have an instrumental relationship with the most critical demand and supply market, Taiwan, where our partner TSRI is re-distributing AAA technology to local universities on our behalf. TSRI is committed to expanding elements of its offer worldwide, including training and design/back-end services, in collaboration with our communities of practice. This provides the scope for more researchers to access cutting-edge FinFET processes and know-how.
Finally, we have experience of working collaboratively (with King’s College London (KCL) and the UK Electronics Skills Foundation) on the previous Skills Education Manufacture Innovation for Semiconductors opportunity, and are now in flight with an exciting project, scaling online semiconductor courses related to KCL’s dedicated Masters’ degree.
We enjoyed the networking opportunity in Wales, made some promising connections and look forward to hearing more about the forthcoming £12m fund.
We're now actively seeking proposals from alliance members to participate in this upcoming bid. Get in contact with us if you would like to discuss further.