News: Microelectronics
7 June 2024
JST and EPSRC announce Japan–UK joint funding opportunity
The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) have announced an international joint funding opportunity – with a closing date of 18 July – to support up to three research projects lasting 41 months (from an anticipated fixed start date of 1 November 2024 until 31 March 2028).
Based on the implementation principles of the ALCA-Next program in Japan and the International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) in the UK, the partnership program aims to support internationally competitive collaborative research projects between Japan and the UK focusing on semiconductor research.
Applications must involve researchers from Japan and the UK. UK applicants must be based at a UK research organization eligible for EPSRC funding. Japanese applicants must be eligible for JST funding.
Applicants may request up to:
- £1.33m (80% of the full economic cost (FEC)) for the UK component;
- ¥234m (including 30% overhead expenses) for the Japanese component.
Scope
Research projects should address one or more of the following four priority areas of joint interest for both Japan and the UK:
- Low-power hardware for artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including:
- low-power design technologies and methods;
- innovative architectures for improving energy efficiency;
- hardware or software systems approach to low-power devices;
- search or generation of algorithm or architecture design space for energy efficiency;
- 3D or 2.5D integrated circuit processes, circuits, and architectures for emerging materials and new computing paradigms;
- compatibility of AI algorithms with semiconductor hardware;
- photonics to address any of these points above, for example low power or low heat or more energy-efficient parallel processing.
- Power devices or radiofrequency devices, including:
- materials, silicon carbide (SiC)-related material processes, evaluation and calculation;
- compound semiconductors more broadly, including GaN, Ga2O3, GaAs, InP, AlN, BN;
- applications in power electronics, radio transmission, materials for photonics;
- active electronics or thermal management, for example diamond.
- Security by design, including:
- trusted electronics;
- security architectures at the design stage so that they are intrinsically part of integrated circuits;
- discrete designs to enable security as part of a package or board;
- approaches for secured-by-design system-on-chip (SoC), for example capability architectures such as Morello and across SoC;
- a focus on hardware and manufacture.
- Semiconductor photonics, including:
- exploring materials for heterogenous integration, for example as a route to low-power electronics, for example photonics, silicon, compound semiconductors, nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS), micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS);
- materials platforms for photonic integrated circuits, for example silicon photonics, compound semiconductors, emerging materials platforms;
- photonic logic;
- photonic integrated circuits (PICs);
- photonic communication across chip and inter-chip (inter package);
- novel devices, for example low-power modulators, efficient coupling to or from PICs, specific reconfigurable devices for AI.
