AI for Productive Research & Innovation in eLectronics (APRIL) Hub

Started

Not Energy Related
Energy Efficiency(Industry)

Basic and strategic applied research
Training

PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Statistics and Operational Research)
PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Computer Science and Informatics)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor T Prodromakis
Sch of Engineering and Electronics
University of Edinburgh

Standard

EPSRC

01 February 2024

31 January 2029

60 months

£10,274,262

Info. & commun. Technol.

Scotland

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Professor T Prodromakis, Sch of Engineering and Electronics, University of Edinburgh

Dr CS Bouganis, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London
Dr J Cole, Physics, University of Cambridge
Professor K Eder, Computer Science, University of Bristol
Professor VP Georgiev, College of Science and Engineering, University of Glasgow
Professor Dame W Hall, Sch of Electronics and Computer Sc, University of Southampton
Professor M O'Boyle, Sch of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Professor M O'Neill, Electronics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast
Professor B Rajendran, Engineering, King's College London
Dr S Ramamoorthy, Sch of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Dr R Shafik, Sch of Engineering, Newcastle University
Professor MM de Souza, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield

Project Contact, Leonardo (UK)
Project Contact, Thales UK Limited
Project Contact, The MathWorks Inc, USA
Project Contact, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)
Project Contact, BAE Systems Integrated System Technologies Limited
Project Contact, Samsung Electronics Research Institute
Project Contact, Intel Corporation, USA
Project Contact, ANSYS Europe Limited
Project Contact, Pragmatic Semiconductor Limited
Project Contact, STMicroelectronics, Switzerland
Project Contact, Keysight Technologies (International)
Project Contact, Park Systems
Project Contact, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) UK
Project Contact, Arc Instruments
Project Contact, Broadex Technologies UK Ltd
Project Contact, Cadence Design Systems Ltd
Project Contact, Cirrus Logic (UK)
Project Contact, Mind Foundry Ltd
Project Contact, Siemens Digital Industries Software - TX
Project Contact, Tessolve
Project Contact, Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA
Project Contact, Synopsys Inc, USA
Project Contact, Oaklands College
Project Contact, Siemens (Germany) (invalid org)
Project Contact, Jeol UK Ltd
Project Contact, Embecosm Ltd.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is undergoing an era of explosive growth. With increasingly capable AI agents such as chatGPT, AlphaFold, Gato and DALL-E capturing the public imagination, the potential impact of AI on modern society is becoming ever clearer for all to see. APRIL is a project that seeks to bring the benefits of AI to the electronics industry of the UK. Specifically, we aspire developing AI tools for cutting development times for everything from new, fundamental materials for electronic devices to complicated microchip designs and system architectures, leading to faster, cheaper, greener and overall, more power-efficient electronics.Imagine a future where extremely complex and intricate material structures, far more complex than what a human could design alone, are optimised by powerful algorithms (such as an AlphaFold for semiconductor materials). Or consider intelligent machines with domain-specialist knowledge (think of a Gato-like system trained on exactly the right milieu of skills) experimenting day and night with manufacturing techniques to build the perfect electronic components. Or yet what if we had algorithms trained to design circuits by interacting with an engineer in natural language (like a chatGPT with specialist knowledge)? Similar comments could be made about systems that would take care of the most tedious bits of testing and verifying increasingly complex systems such as mobile phone chipsets or aircraft avionics software, or indeed for modelling and simulating electronics (both potentially achievable by using semi-automated AI coders such asGoogle's "PaLM" model). This is precisely the cocktail of technologies that APRIL seeks to develop.In this future, AI - with its capabilities of finding relevant information, performing simple tasks when instructed to do so and its incredible speed - would operate under the supervision of experienced engineers for assisting them in creating electronics suited to an ever-increasing palette of requirements, from low-power systems to chips manufactured to be recyclable to ultra-secure systems for handling the most sensitive and private data. To achieve this, APRIL brings together a large consortium of universities, industry and government bodies, working together to develop: i) the new technologies of the future, ii) the tools that will make these technologies a reality and very importantly, iii) the people with the necessary skills (for building as well as using such new tools) to ensure that the UK remains a capable and technologically advanced player in the global electronics industry.

20/03/24