Welcome to the Silicon South West network – the organisation that provides regular networking events, news and national and international promotion for the region’s microelectronics cluster.
The South West of Englands microelectronics sector
Over 100 companies connected to the microelectronics sector are concentrated in a region which includes the key towns & cities of: Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, Southampton & Swindon. In fact it is home to one of the biggest silicon design clusters anywhere in the world outside Silicon Valley.
In the last decade, start-ups in the South West have attracted more than $550 million in investment and returned more than $800 million to shareholders.
The cluster has also attracted high levels of investment from world-class research organisations including HP Labs, Motorola, Panasonic, ST Microelectronics and Toshiba Telecoms Research Europe and the Universities of Bath and Bristol. Additionally other international electronics companies such as Intel, Broadcom and Infineon each have a significant presence in the region, while semiconductor design companies such as Wolfson and Dialog Semiconductors have set-up design centres in the South West in order to tap into the local skills.
This skills pool owes its origins to Inmos in Bristol and GEC-Plessey Semiconductor in Swindon. These two organisations effectively trained a generation of silicon designers and while the enterprises themselves have since changed beyond recognition, the individual designers have remained at the forefront of developments, particularly in the key areas of RF, video, multicore processor and reconfigurable components as well as wireless, telecoms and networking system design.
Silicon South West is run by Simon Bond, Director of Innovation and Networks at Bath Ventures, the University of Bath’s IP commercialisation group.
Silicon South west news is written by some of the UK’s leading journalists and technologists:
- Nick Flaherty, Editorial Director of SiliconSouthWest and global technology journalist at www.flaherty.co.uk
- David Manners, the UK electronics industry’s leading commentator and correspondent at Electronics Weekly
- Nadya Anscombe, leading science technology journalist at www.nadya-anscombe.com
