However, access to silicon prototyping facilities remains a challenge in the UK due to the high cost of both equipment and the cleanroom facilities that are required to house the equipment. Furthermore, there is often a disconnect in communication between industry and academia, resulting in some industrial challenges remaining unsolved, and support, training, and networking opportunities for academics to engage with commercialisation activities isn't widespread. The C-PIC host institutions comprising University of Southampton, University of Glasgow and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), together with 105 partners at proposal stage, will overcome these challenges by uniting leading UK entrepreneurs and researchers, together with a network of support to streamline the route to commercialisation, translating a wide range of technologies from research labs into industry, underpinned by the C-PIC silicon photonics prototyping foundry. Applications will cover data centre communications; sensing for healthcare, the environment & defence; quantum technologies; artificial intelligence; LiDAR; and more. We will deliver our vision by fulfilling these objectives: Translate a wide range of silicon photonics technologies from research labs into industry, supporting the creation of new companies & jobs, and subsequently social & economic impact. Interconnect the UK silicon photonics ecosystem, acting as the front door to UK expertise, including by launching an online Knowledge Hub. Fund a broad range of Innovation projects supporting industrial-academic collaborations aimed at solving real world industry problems, with the overarching goal of demonstrating high potential solutions in a variety of application areas. Embed equality, diversity, and inclusion best practice into everything we do. Deliver the world's only open source, fully flexible silicon photonics prototyping foundry based on industry-like technology, facilitating straightforward scale-up to commercial viability. Support entrepreneurs in their journey to commercialisation by facilitating networks with venture capitalists, mentors, training, and recruitment. Represent the interests of the community at large with policy makers and the public, becoming an internationally renowned Centre able to secure overseas investment and international partners. Act as a convening body for the field in the UK, becoming a hub of skills, knowledge, and networking opportunities, with regular events aimed at ensuring possibilities for advancing the field and delivering impact are fully exploited. Increase the number of skilled staff working in impact generating roles in the field of silicon photonics via a range of training events and company growth, whilst routinely seeking additional funding to expand training offerings.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is undergoing an era of explosive growth. With increasingly capable AI agents such as chatGPT, AlphaFold, Gato and DALL-E capturing the public imagination, the potential impact of AI on modern society is becoming ever clearer for all to see. APRIL is a project that seeks to bring the benefits of AI to the electronics industry of the UK. Specifically, we aspire developing AI tools for cutting development times for everything from new, fundamental materials for electronic devices to complicated microchip designs and system architectures, leading to faster, cheaper, greener and overall, more power-efficient electronics. Imagine a future where extremely complex and intricate material structures, far more complex than what a human could design alone, are optimised by powerful algorithms (such as an AlphaFold for semiconductor materials). Or consider intelligent machines with domain-specialist knowledge (think of a Gato-like system trained on exactly the right milieu of skills) experimenting day and night with manufacturing techniques to build the perfect electronic components. Or yet what if we had algorithms trained to design circuits by interacting with an engineer in natural language (like a chatGPT with specialist knowledge)? Similar comments could be made about systems that would take care of the most tedious bits of testing and verifying increasingly complex systems such as mobile phone chipsets or aircraft avionics software, or indeed for modelling and simulating electronics (both potentially achievable by using semi-automated AI coders such as Google's "PaLM" model). This is precisely the cocktail of technologies that APRIL seeks to develop. In this future, AI - with its capabilities of finding relevant information, performing simple tasks when instructed to do so and its incredible speed - would operate under the supervision of experienced engineers for assisting them in creating electronics suited to an ever-increasing palette of requirements, from low-power systems to chips manufactured to be recyclable to ultra-secure systems for handling the most sensitive and private data. To achieve this, APRIL brings together a large consortium of universities, industry and government bodies, working together to develop: i) the new technologies of the future, ii) the tools that will make these technologies a reality and very importantly, iii) the people with the necessary skills (for building as well as using such new tools) to ensure that the UK remains a capable and technologically advanced player in the global electronics industry.