Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
But the project, dubbed Alba, goes much further, with the setting up of degree courses at local universities and an intellectual property (IP) exchange centre.
The design centre will create between 1,800 and 1,900 jobs, giving rise to close to 6,000 jobs in total with a 2:1 ratio of employment creation in the community. Cadence is setting up a leading systems-on-a-chip design centre in Livingston, and will spend several hundred million dollars.
This will be the largest and most important centre in Cadence’s chain of design houses called design factories. Other units specialise in digital, RF, analogue and mixed signal design. This means Scotland could become the world’s most important centre for chip design.
Scottish Enterprise hopes the design factory will seed further investment from other companies including start-ups. In addition to the design facility, an educational centre will be created. This will be run by four Scottish Universities – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot Watt and Strathclyde.
The Scottish universities will have a masters degree course for system-on-a-chip design in place by the next academic year. This aims to redress the severe shortage of capable chip designers.
Perhaps the most technically exciting and challenging part of the project is the setting up of an IP exchange. System-on-a-chip ICs are the next stage of miniaturisation in electronics, and their design requires IP. It is no longer possible to design from scratch multimillion gate chips with today’s time-to-market pressures.
Project Alba hopes designers will register their IP at the exchange. Users of IP would then negotiate with the exchange, leaving the IP companies to get on with designing. The thorniest issue when transferring IP between companies is the legal one. Since the US is a litigious country, siting the exchange there was out of the question.
Scotland was chosen for the converse reason. IBM will supply the required electronic commerce technology needed for exchanging IP.
www.sli-scotland.org.uk
What about the rest of the UK?
Scotland’s regional initiative in attracting foreign microelectronics companies is not shared by some other parts of the UK, most notably Cambridge – arguably the most successful high-tech area in the country.
Kelvin Harrison, chief executive of Cambridge-based Symbionics, points out that companies will only locate in any region of the UK if there are significant government cash incentives.
