Savant Company Inc. Sponsors Two Outstanding Meetings with

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), British Consulate-General, Los Angeles,

 
on March 5th and March 7th, 2008, at the Fairmont Newport Beach Hotel

March 5th & March 7th Meetings in Pictures . . . 

You are invited to an introductory meeting with Mr. John Moor, Director of Marketing, National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) of the United Kingdom and the UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) Group of the British Consulate-General in Los Angeles to learn about the UK's semiconductor business potential and the UK's business incentives, as well as explore business development and expansion opportunities in that region!
 

Mr. Moor will discuss:

• Semiconductor business development opportunities in the UK

• How American companies could benefit from extensive design resources (e.g., Analog, Mixed Signal, Wireless, etc.) available in the UK

• R&D programs in key UK universities

• Collaboration on technology exchange/sharing with UK-based companies

• Utilizing UK Ph.D. students for engineering projects via extensive internship programs available throughout the country

• Business infrastructure incentives provided in each technology center

• Tax credit incentives for R&D, startups, etc.

• How American companies can penetrate the European market via establishing marketing and sales channels in the UK

• And much, much more

Space is limited. To register in advance for one of these two complimentary events, please contact the event organizing committee at:

UK@SavantCompany.com

Who Should Attend: Semiconductor industry executives, investors, academic liaisons, technologists, trade organizations, technology forums, technology media editors, and agencies interested in learning about the UK and its business potential.  

You are welcome to participate in one of these two events at the Fairmont Newport Beach Hotel:

(1) Dinner Meeting:  Wednesday, March 5, 2008

6:00 PM - 7:00 PM Introduction and Networking

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM Dinner & Discussion

(2) Breakfast Meeting:  Friday, March 7, 2008

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM Introduction and Networking

8:00 AM - 9:30 AM Breakfast & Discussion

Location for both meetings: Fairmont Newport Beach Hotel, 4500 MacArthur Blvd, Newport Beach, California (Parking is free)

About Our Special Guest, John Moor,

Director of Marketing, National Microelectronics Institute (NMI)

John joined NMI in 2004 as an Industry Consultant before becoming head of marketing. John brings over 20 years industry experience to the position from technical and business management roles in leading edge technology organizations. His work at NMI has included the establishment and operation of several design related technical networks, researching and authoring reports on key industry themes and driving NMI’s strategy. Prior to joining NMI, John was VP Operations and a founder of ClearSpeed Technology – a Bristol based fabless semiconductor company, VP Product Marketing at nSine Ltd, Product Manager at Division Ltd as well as other technical engineering positions within electronic product companies. John served on the board of directors of the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) between 2000-2002, holds an MA in Strategic Marketing Management from Kingston University (London), an MBA from Leicester University and was a college graduate in Electronic Engineering in 1988.

BRIEFING NOTE:  SEMICONDUCTOR DESIGN IN UK
Summary

The UK’s semiconductor designers have in recent years taken a lead position in several niche areas as a result of globalization and commoditization and the strength of the UK ICT market.

Many UK semiconductor firms now specialize in semiconductor design for manufacture by offshore foundries. Several leading players have emerged in a number of niche technology areas, such as low power “mixed mode” devices and specialist computing architectures, to serve specific needs within the UK and global IT, communications, consumer electronics and other industrial markets.

The UK market for Communications and IT suppliers is the most attractive in Europe. Already #2 by value, the UK market for ICT products and services is growing faster than that of France, Germany, and Italy so UK is likely to become #1 EU market for ICT within a few years.

The UK hosts operations of more than 500 semiconductor firms, 80% of which are foreign-owned. These firms employ some 8,000+ engineering staff, 3,000 or so undertaking design engineering related tasks and around 50% of these focus on analogue, RF, or mixed signal design.

The areas around Bristol and Cambridge are currently generating a significant flow of successful start-ups to add to those in areas such as Silicon Glen (mostly between Edinburgh and Glasgow), and the Thames Valley to the West of London.

The lower capital intensity of fabless design specialists allows many UK start-ups to operate as so-called “soft-starts” funded by contract R&D, although the more ambitious firms seek risk capital at an early stage.

However, the UK, with its strengthening VC community and AIM and LSE markets is becoming a stronger market in which to raise international risk capital and accelerate growth.
 

Context

The semiconductor industry continues to evolve rapidly. The complexity of devices continues to grow as continuing miniaturization allows more functionality to be integrated into each device; that rise in complexity increases the design and test challenge while reduced feature sizes and manufacturing volumes increase the capital cost of fabrication plants.

The latter effect has put the costs of remaining a fully integrated device manufacturer beyond the resources of all but the top ten or so global manufacturers who need massive market scale to achieve a rate of return on the multi-billion dollar capital investment per plant; this effect has, in turn, led to the rise of fabless semiconductor companies working with specialist foundries.

The former effect has led to the emergence of design houses that specialize in complex integration of analogue and digital circuitry within a single chip, often reusing proven design “cores” to address parts of the solution and arranging manufacture by a selected foundry.

Added to these effects is the emergence of mass markets for semiconductors in high growth, lower labor cost markets such as China, India, Korea etc encouraging location of fabrication plants and associated design capabilities in these countries.
 

ICT Market size

The UK market for communications, IT, and consumer electronics has continued to grow faster than that of other major European markets in recent years; as a result of which the UK market could soon become the leading EU market in this area. This growth is partly the result of the growth of London as a leading global market in financial services, itself partly the result of record inward investment levels into the UK and the ICT demands of those firms.

The UK IT market should overtake that of Germany next year; in 2007 it is expected to be worth approximately €70 billion p.a.

The UK Communications market should continue growing faster than France, Germany and Italy; in 2007 it is expected to be worth around €58 billion p.a. - #2 by value

The UK market for Consumer Electronics is the largest in EU; in 2007 it is expected to be worth around €13 billion p.a.

This market strength has positive implications throughout the electronics supply chain.
 

UK’s Technology Focus

The semiconductor industry is now dominated by sales of general purpose microprocessors, memory chips, and digital signal processors, designed and/or fabricated in US and Asia. However some 15% of global Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design starts are made in UK. Ranging in complexity from 70 million transistors on 65nm CMOS to 50 transistor analogue, they generally fall into one of three niche design areas in which UK engineers and researchers excel:
 

High performance digital computing architectures
 

Often optimized for low power consumption for use in mobile phones, PDAs, and other portable battery powered devices;
ARM, Cambridge Consultants, Cyan Semiconductor, Sondrel, and Swindon Silicon Systems are among the key UK firms in this area;
 

Research Groups at the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial, Kent, Queens Belfast, and Warwick undertake substantial related research.
 

Specialized mixed mode architectures for high performance audio and video processing

Ant, EnSilica, Mirics, Pace, and Wolfson Microelectronics are examples of specialist firms in this area;
 

Research groups at Cambridge, Glasgow, Imperial, Liverpool, and University College are particularly strong in the necessary analogue design areas.
 

Specialized mixed mode architectures for high performance RF and digital processing
 

CSR, elonics, icera, Plextek, and TTPCom are some of the key firms in this area;
Research Groups at Birmingham, Cambridge, Imperial, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, St Andrews, Surrey, University College, and Warwick, all receive substantial related government research funding.

In addition, firms such as CriticalBlue, Celoxica and Imperas are supporting UK’s design strengths by creating advanced tools to raise design productivity, efficiency and complexity to new levels.

Geographic Clustering

The UK has four geographic regions with high concentrations of semiconductor design expertise:

1) South East England hosts firms such as Analog Devices, EnSilica, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Micron, Mirics, NXP, Samsung, ST Microelectronics etc and leading University Research groups at Oxford, Southampton, and Surrey etc.

2) Scotland hosts firms such as elonics, Freescale, National Semiconductor, etc and leading University Research groups at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Strathclyde.
 

3) East of England hosts Ant, ARC, ARM, CSR, Cyan, and Sagentia etc and leading University Research groups at Cambridge with London’s Imperial and University Colleges nearby.

4) South West England hosts firms such as ClearSpeed, Icera, Intel, PicoChip, ST Microelectronics, and Toshiba etc and leading University Research groups at Bath, Bristol, and nearby Southampton.
 

Sources

This note draws on research undertaken by DTI, EITO, National Microelectronics Institute, and UK Trade & Investment.
 

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