UK to create IMEC style research center: report

News | May 8, 2023

By Peter Clarke

As part of its soon-to-be-announced semiconductor strategy the UK government plans to create a £10 million “innovation and knowledge centre,” according to a newspaper report.

A notice from the UKRI – the UK government’s innovation funding agency – says the centre will be set up “to develop sovereign capability and enable the UK to go beyond Moore’s Law,” The Telegraph reported. The report said the centre would be modelled on Ireland’s Tyndall Institute or Belgium’s IMEC, referencing an unnamed source.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to announce the research institute as part of plans for a £1bn UK semiconductor strategy due to be announced at the G7 meeting in Hiroshima, May 19 to 21.

There are separate plans for a “design incubator” facility that will allow startups to develop prototype circuits, the report said.

Only £1 billion

That the UK semiconductor strategy could include as little as £1 billion in government subsidy has brought concerned responses from some observers. The amount is small compared with the state aid proposed under the US and European Chips Acts (see US sets timetable for CHIPS Act cash and European Chips Act could include powers for EU control). The US Chips Act is worth US$280 billion to be spent over the next ten years while the European Chips Act talks of €43 billion being invested over the period to 2030.

Others have pointed out that UK has few wafer fabs and should not engage in a “subsidy war” with the US and the European Union to try and attract volume manufacturing. Instead it should use what money it has to pursue such technologies as graphene, compound semiconductors and photonics. Here the UK already has a good technology base and the cost of upscaling that base is relatively low.

The UK semiconductor strategy has been more than two years in the making and was expected to be rolled out in 2022 and then March 2023. The delay has brought criticism from some domestic chip companies and even threats to relocate (see Pragmatic CEO tells UK government, support us or we leave and UK could lose wafer maker IQE over delayed chip strategy).

In 2022 the UK government ordered Chinese-owned Nexperia to sell off the majority of its ownership of a wafer fab in Newport, Wales, on national security grounds (Nexperia engages broker to sell Newport wafer fab). A newly-independent fab there could resume its role as a focus of compound semiconductor cluster in South Wales, under the semiconductor strategy.