Semiconductor manufacturing scale-up - feasibility

Scope

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £11.5 million in innovation projects. These are to assist the improvement and scale up for semiconductor manufacture within the UK.

Eligibility

The aim of this competition is to enable UK businesses in the semiconductor supply chain to develop their manufacturing capability. This will be achieved by building resilience in the UK supply chain for the key area of enabling technologies.

In this feasibility study phase Innovate UK will invest up to £1.5 million with the aim of:

understanding the existing facilities and capabilities
identifying best practice
establishing innovations and new manufacturing techniques
encouraging new collaborations across industry and academia

Your proposal must identify or deliver a clear, game-changing intervention and address a clear industrial requirement or improvement. This must realistically and significantly meet and provide a long-term commitment to supporting the UK semiconductor industry requirement.

Specific Themes

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

compound semiconductors
silicon semiconductors
development of Process Design Kits (PDKs)
manufacturing process development and best practice for scale-up
device and circuit simulation and design
semiconductor wafer and device fabrication
front end of line processes
back end of line processes
in-line and end of line test
assembly packaging and test
wafer fabrication operations sustainability
cross-sectoral solutions
hybridisation or heterogeneous development,
system-on-chip development
system-in-package development
open access foundries models
accelerate development cycles
proof of concept and validation of designs
test innovative designs and processes

This list is not intended to be exhaustive.

Eligibility

Your project must:

have total project costs of up to £150,000
start by 1 August 2023
end by 31 November 2023
last up to 4 months
carry out all of its project work in the UK
intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

You must only include eligible project costs in your application.

Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.

To lead a project or work alone your organisation must:

be a UK registered business of any size
be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)

If collaborative you can work with other UK registered organisations.

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

business of any size
academic institution
charity
not for profit
public sector organisation
research and technology organisation (RTO)

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.

To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.

Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

A business can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications.

If an organisation is not leading any application, it can collaborate in up to 3 applications.

You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.

Exclusions

Innovate UK are not funding projects that are:

printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication
PCB assembly and test, excluding bare die operations
discrete passive devices, excluding on-chip integration

Innovate UK cannot fund projects that are:

dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Funding Costs

Up to £1.5 million has been allocated to fund projects in this feasibility phase of this programme. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.

For feasibility studies, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
up to 50% if you are a large organisation

The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 45% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them. Of that 45% you could get funding for your eligible project costs of up to:

80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a Je-S registered institution such as an academic
100% of your project costs if you are an RTO, charity, not for profit organisation, public sector organisation or research organisation

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Semiconductor manufacturing scale-up – feasibility

Scope

Eligibility

Specific Themes

Eligibility

Exclusions

Funding Costs

Interested in applying for this competition?