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.

Electech, covering areas such as sensors, power electronics, embedded computing, wireless communication technology, autonomous systems and large-area electronics, is predicted to play a foundational role in the future development of industries and value chains. It is central to Innovate UK's core strategy and its importance to future economic growth cannot be overstated. It is vital that the UK maintains a strong electronics design and technology base in the face of international developments. The proposed European chips act (February 2022), will mobilise 43 43 billion euros by 2030 in 'policy-driven investment' for the EU's semiconductor sector. The US CHIPS Act will result in a $280 billion investment to bolster their semiconductor capacity, catalyse R&D, create regional high-tech hubs and grow a more inclusive STEM workforce. The UK has a very vibrant but dispersed, electronic systems academic community, organised into larger activities in the universities of Glasgow, Imperial College London, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London and Queen's University Belfast as well as satellite activities in a range of other universities. The community have been able to organise into an effective electronic systems community via the eFutures network (EPSRC eFutures2.0: Addressing Future Challenges grant, May2019-2023). In addition to growing the community, the objectives of the existing eFutures2.0 network had been to explore multidisciplinary opportunities for the sector. The successes of eFutures include: the organisation of 20+ in-person and online events (1825 attendees); the creation of a new website and a YouTube channel with 34 videoed talks (speakers from 19 countries) with a total of 1180 views; increased network membership by over 400% and move from a pure mailout model to include social media, achieving 64% of event attendees who had not previously engaged with the network; the delivery of two new, strategic landscaping reports: 'UK Landscape in AI & Brain-Inspired Computing Hardware' (Q4 2021) and 'Electronics for Healthcare: R&D across the UK' (expected Q1 2023). The 2021 Report had national media coverage, follow-up events (150 attendees), an upcoming, high-value proposal and a mention in the EPSRC Delivery Plan. The Healthcare Report results from online and in-person events (264 attendees) leading to a Programme Grant proposal. The network funded six multidisciplinary, concept projects (£78k), benefitting 11 academics across ten UK and four international universities; and delivered focussed engagement with 59 early-career and 30 mid-career researchers via two in-person workshops and online training. Ultimately, the aim is to further enhance the impact of UK electronics systems academic research and put the community in a strong, competitive position for collaboration with both national and international researchers, and industry. As highlighted above this will be achieved by continuing to build and growing network membership, organising the Net-Zero multidisciplinary event to engage our community more broadly in the area with other academic areas and companies to tackle this key topic, represent a strong focus on the electronics systems academic community in the UK, supporting early career researchers and growing the community by encouraging interaction or the national and international level and increasing the funding. We will achieve this by building on the successes of the eFutures2.0 activity with the same leadership team and steering group. The success and commitment to this activity is indicated by the in-kind commitment of £64,000 from our steering group companies.

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.