Britain’s chip lab has taken on a wider job

The public lab that British firms use when a chip is still a prototype changed its name yesterday. The Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult is now the Semiconductor Catapult. The buildings are the ones it already had, in Newport, Bristol and Glasgow.

The job is wider than the old name suggested. For years the centre worked on compound chips, the sort used in power electronics, radio and light, rather than the ordinary silicon in a computer. From yesterday it is also there for the silicon that goes into AI hardware and defence kit, and for the awkward bit in between: getting a design out of a paper and into a package that can be tested.

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Labs, in Newport, Bristol and Glasgow

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Areas of work, from packaging to radio

June

When the government said the change was coming

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New money announced with yesterday’s launch

What you can book

The centre says it will work in four places. Packaging, including the newer habit of putting several smaller chips into one module instead of printing one enormous chip. Power electronics, and the heat that comes off them when a data centre or a vehicle asks for more. Photonics, the optical links that move data inside those buildings, and the sensors beside them. And radio, for the beam-forming used in defence and communications, where analogue and digital have to live on the same board.

Packaging is the part a buyer feels first. An AI accelerator is often no longer one die. It is several, sat on a substrate that has to feed them power and get the heat out. That substrate, and the module around it, is where a British design firm can still do the work even when the wafer was printed somewhere else. The Catapult is offering the bench for that work. It is not offering the wafer.

That is a useful list if you are designing a power module, an optical link or a defence radio in Britain and you need a bench before you commit a line. The Catapult says it is the only place in the country, and one of the few in Europe, where those skills sit in the same building. Firms already pay it for commercial work, not only for grant projects. Start-ups, mid-sized firms and large ones can all use it.

The first phase is the honest one. Prove the architecture. Cut the risk. Get a core silicon capability in place so a customer can see whether the thing works. The second phase is the one people will quote: a route to small-volume production. Small volume is not a foundry. It is a way to make enough parts to qualify a product, not enough to fill a car plant or a server hall.

What did not happen

Nobody opened a wafer fab yesterday. Nobody published a budget for the new name. In June the government set out an AI hardware plan of more than £1.1 billion, public and private together, and said this Catapult would be refocused as part of it. That sum covers a lot of other things, including a £120 million innovation programme and a separate £18 million pot for hardware security. It is not a cheque that arrived with yesterday’s announcement.

The organisation itself said in June that the change was coming. Yesterday was the day it started using the new name and said what the first two phases would be. Caroline O’Brien, the chief executive, put the point in one line: the market in AI hardware and defence is moving quickly, and the centre exists so more of the supply chain stays in Britain. She also said the decisions taken now decide where the companies, and the value, end up. That is an ambition. It is not a capacity figure.

Newport, the same day

The same afternoon, a separate announcement landed on the same patch of South Wales. Cardiff Capital Region opened an investment zone across three sites in Cardiff and Newport, with £160 million from the UK government and a hope of another £500 million from private firms. The backers talk about 4,000 skilled jobs over ten years. Most of those, they say, would come from the compound semiconductor cluster, which employs about 2,000 people now and wants 6,000 by 2030. Imperial Park in Newport is already home to IQE, Vishay and KLA, and to the Catapult’s own innovation centre. The zone does not fund the Catapult. They are neighbours. One is a lab you can hire. The other is a pitch for a building next door.

What a buyer can actually use

A firm that specifies a power device, a packaged module or a radio still has the same problem it had on Monday. The volume line is usually in Asia. What Britain has added is a clearer front door for the work before that line: design help, a test, a package, and later a small run. If your programme needs tens of thousands of parts a week, this centre will not make them. If it needs someone to prove the package before you send the drawing abroad, that is the offer.

Newport already has commercial chip firms on the same park. The Catapult does not replace them, and it does not replace a contract manufacturer. It sits in front of them. The useful question for a buyer is which phase a given part is in. If it is still in the first, you are paying for a test. If someone tells you the Catapult is now a British chip factory, they have skipped the second sentence of the announcement.