A new automated facility in Glasgow will take semiconductor chips from raw device testing all the way through to finished, packaged electronics—without a human touching the production line. This matters because the UK has lost most of its semiconductor manufacturing to Asia, leaving researchers and companies dependent on a fragile global supply chain. The ANALOGUE facility fills a critical gap: it gives UK researchers a way to prototype and test new chip designs, then package them into working devices, all under one roof. Currently, that back-end packaging work—bonding chips to boards, adding 3D-printed components, laser-patterning circuits—is almost entirely done overseas, a "black box" that UK innovators cannot easily access. If successful, ANALOGUE will let medical researchers build implantable ultrasonic devices, industrial groups test new sensors, and electronics designers experiment with sustainable manufacturing—all remotely, via an automated platform. It insulates the UK’s electronics research from chip shortages and supply-chain disruptions. The facility also embeds circular-economy thinking from the start, helping manufacturers meet demands from buyers like Apple to assess environmental impact across a product’s entire lifecycle.
View original technical description
The electronics industry "ElecTech" sector is central to the UK's future economy, environment, and society. With over 1 million employees in sectors enabled by electronics, the contribution of electronic technologies is indispensable. At the heart of electronics are nanoelectronic semiconductor "chips", and it has a leading position in semiconductor intellectual property vendors and emerging areas such as quantum technologies, sustainable electronics manufacturing, and compound semiconductors. The UK's potential lies, and where its future role in the global semiconductor value chain lies, as evidenced in the BEIS committee inquiry. We will establish an Automated Nano AnaLysing, characterisatiOn and additive packaGing sUitE (ANALOGUE) suite. ANALOGUE will be an exemplary facility that provides a fully automated platform for semiconductor processing, from devices to applications, with centralised workflow design, data collection/capture and real-time analytics. ANALOGUE will enable wafer-scale fully automated electrical characterisation of devices including reliability and temperature cycling capabilities. A fully automated back-end processing platform is integrated enabling die- and wire-bonding, 3D printed electronics and additive heterogenous packaging, co-located with high-resolution printed circuit laser patterning. Co-located with the £35M James Watt Nanofabrication Centre (JWNC), and the Centre for Advanced Electronics (CAE), the facility will enable devices-to-systems across the ICT spectrum, towards a user-centric and responsible design approach for electronics manufacturing. With a team representing two application-oriented user groups, medical and industrial nanoelectronics, we will create an ecosystem whereby manufacturing, users, and circular economy experts are brought together as users of ANALOGUE. ANALOGUE will support research on implantables, wearables, and diagnostics, through ultrasonic devices. Embedding sustainable manufacturing and onshoring the research into the backend processes of electronics is crucial to meeting the requirements of future electronics design flows. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) buyers like Apple are already demanding commitments from suppliers to decarbonise their products, with distributors expected to assess each product's environmental impact throughout its lifecycle - from design and manufacture to end-of-life. As such, ANALOGUE allows UK researchers to explore the "black-box" of the semiconductor supply chain using automated characterisation and heterogenous packaging, encompassed by an automation and data collection framework for evaluating the efficacy of our experimental workflows. ANALOGUE will be accessible to the UK's research community across HealthTech, Beyond-Moore Computing, and Circular and Sustainable Electronics. Owing to its automated and streamlined nature, ANALOGUE will allow users from different institutions to utilise the suite remotely, facilitated by expert technical support, enabling rapid innovation across the nanoelectronics spectrum, insulating the UK's electronics research eco-system from global supply chain interruptions, e.g. chip shortages, and underpinning new research into otherwise offshore aspects of the electronics manufacturing. ANALOGUE builds on the UK's internationally acknowledged strengths in low-power IC Design, electronic materials, and applications in sustainable manufacturing. The Glasgow collaboration as an essential link in the supply chain linking materials producers (e.g., IQE), designers (Arm) manufacturers (PragmatIC Semiconductors, Printed Electronics, MTC), with academic users. The ANALOGUE team will regularly engage with these stakeholders through joint projects, meetings, workshops, and targeted events. The alignment of the proposal with the strategic sustainable systems focus of UofG will also help the envisaged research's long-term planning and strategy building.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know