The institute for System Level Integration (iSLI) has been awarded £1.12 M of funding by Scottish Enterprise to assist UK industry with the adoption of cutting-edge micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The award will establish a publicly accessible centre of design excellence, providing the commercial sector with access to expertise and knowledge transfer for the rapid development of product prototypes.
The centre, based in Livingston, Scotland, will focus on the field of silicon-based MEMS technology and a key element is the significant support of Coventor Inc., which provides the cutting-edge toolset that will be used to perform the complex design and analysis tasks needed to develop new products.
For this initiative, iSLI has teamed up with its partners, Heriot Watt University and Strathclyde University, and the SemeMEMS open access facility. The partnership of the Centre for Microsystems and Photonics (CMP) at Strathclyde brings extensive experience in design for foundry manufacture together with a significant test and characterisation facility. The Micro-Engineering group of Heriot Watt complements this with world-class expertise in reliability and lifetime prediction of microsystems. Linking these research capabilities to the customer, through the market facing iSLI, will ensure that technology push and market pull are quickly and successfully married.
Mark Begbie, MEMS group manager at iSLI, comments, “I believe the partnership we have brought together presents a uniquely powerful value proposition to the technology sector within UK Plc. The centre’s smooth integration of research capability with market focus and commercial foundry will be a real step forward in bridging the exploitation gap that so often hinders new technology uptake. By maintaining a market pull focus we expect to have a real impact on new product development.”