£4m network for European device manufacturing
A network of European universities has met for the first time in the UK to look at ways to boost manufacturing of digital equipment.
The Pro squared plus network brings together the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster, Nottingham and Bath in the UK to look at ways to boost manufacturing over the next five years. Other partners include universities at Aalborg and Aarhus, Copenhagen, Saarland, Genoble Alpes and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as well as Stanford in the US. Commercial partners include ARM, prototype board maker Eurocircuits (UK) and Silicon Press in Cambridge.
““This is the launch of a five year programme of work for us and the first of a series of opportunities to influence the work,” said Prof Mike Fraser, processor of computer science at the university of Bristol and the network lead.
“There has been a lot of discussion around digital manufacturing but we felt that a lot of digital manufacturing was more about AI for manufacturing and there was very little in manufacturing for electronic digital devices and we wanted to bring that community more closely together,“ he said.
This could include looking at digital twins, materials, microcontroller platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, as well as EDA and fabrication tools and scalability for high volume manufacturing. This could include using agile software development techniques and tools to speed up hardware design, development and production processes.
The network aims to fund 5 to 7 proposals running for a year with a deadline for proposals in June.
