The electronics industry is struggling to adopt AI tools that could dramatically speed up chip design, manufacturing, and testing—and the APRIL+ programme aims to fix that bottleneck. A UK-wide AI hub has spent its first year proving that electronics companies urgently want AI-driven productivity tools, but face real barriers: poor access to usable data, limited computing power, and a shortage of engineers who know how to apply AI to hardware problems. APRIL+ extends that work, adding industry-matched funding to roll out AI tools and training across the entire electronics supply chain over the next six months. If successful, the programme could reshape how electronics are designed and built in the UK—from the chips inside smartphones and medical devices to the sensors in energy grids and autonomous vehicles. Faster, cheaper, and more reliable electronics would benefit industries that rarely make headlines but quietly underpin modern life: communications infrastructure, manufacturing lines, and diagnostic equipment. The project also aims to boost national access to AI computing resources and create open benchmarks for future work, making it easier for other sectors to follow.
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Never has the merge between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Science being so strong with AI being progressively used to drive productivity enhancements in engineering innovations and technology. The EPSRC APRIL AI Hub is established with the mission of bringing the electronics and AI communities together for developing and bringing to market AI-based tools that boosts productivity across the entire electronics industry supply chain. Through our first year of operations, we were able to attest to: (1) an exceptional demand – significantly greater from what we originally captured – for developing, validating and deploying such AI tools across the whole electronics sector, as verified via additional members joining APRIL and with industry sharing openly their needs through our stakeholders’ events. (2) a range of challenges related to the availability and usability of accessible data, along with access to state-of-art technology, next-generation AI compute infrastructure, and the necessary practical know-how and appropriate benchmarks for using all of these to propel impactful and trustworthy innovations. APRIL established an efficient collaborative framework that has already proven our ability to address #1 with speed and at scale. Here, we propose a range of additional actions, not originally accounted for in our original proposal due to funding and other resource constraints. These are inspired and supported through our extensive stakeholders’ engagement over the past year and bring additional prospects in maximising APRIL’s impact and reach across the UK through: (1) a nation-wide access to emerging tools and technology, (2) shaping the skills of engineers internationally, (3) the curation of state-of-art AI models and benchmarking parameters on the latest electronics technologies these run, (4) boosting the UK emerging AI compute capability and national access to it, and (5) disrupting our approach to knowledge creation and exchange through hands-on activities/events. This extended programme (APRIL+) of activities will be co-supported through additional matched funding from industry, ensuring the realisation of impactful deliverables over the next 6 months.
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