News: Suppliers
26 November 2025
NPL leading Government-backed metrology project to accelerate UK’s role in compound semiconductor innovation
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK has been appointed by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to lead a £1.2m Government-funded project to establish new metrology capabilities that will strengthen the UK’s semiconductor innovation infrastructure. The strategic investment aims to accelerate the UK’s role in developing next-generation semiconductor materials and processes, helping to attract private investment and boost economic growth in the sector.
NPL will deliver this project in partnership with several industrial and academic partners spanning the entire innovation landscape – Vishay Newport Ltd; GEN3; Custom Interconnect Ltd; Element Six; RENA; Viper RF; Keysight Technologies; the Henry Royce Institute; Power Roll; Poro Technologies; Oxford Instruments; Swansea University; the University of Cambridge; and the University of Warwick.
It is reckoned that these capabilities are urgently needed to address critical bottlenecks in UK semiconductor innovation, such as ensuring material integrity and guaranteeing device reliability under extreme conditions.
Silicon’s mature global industry is dominated by a few major players. In contrast, the growing demand for emerging technologies (from electric vehicles to 5G networks) is accelerating innovation in the use of advanced materials that excel in high-performance applications where speed, optical precision and energy efficiency are critical. These materials include compound semiconductors such as gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC), as well as perovskites (increasingly used in solar panels and LEDs), and their supporting processes, from prototyping to fabrication and performance verification.
To fully harness the potential of these materials, robust standards and access to measurement capabilities are essential. Standards provide benchmarks to verify that semiconductor innovations work, building industry confidence, and de-risking investment. They also allow the structure, performance and reliability of advanced semiconductor materials to be compared across applications, supporting process optimization, and ensuring interoperability, so players across complex supply chains can work together effectively. This rapidly expanding field represents a major opportunity for UK leadership, it is reckoned.
Under this new project the consortium partners are expected to accelerate the UK ability to capitalize on that opportunity by:
- Combining the academic expertise of the consortium’s university partners with NPL’s metrology experience to create new UK measurement capabilities for advanced semiconductor materials. These include new measurement and test capabilities for the UK semiconductor innovation ecosystem and new metrology methods that can address key challenges for the adoption of advanced semiconductor materials globally.
- Applying these capabilities to address critical bottlenecks in UK semiconductor innovation. These challenges range from assessing material purity and testing the reliability of new devices under thermal and electrical stress, to verifying the integrity of radio frequency signals and developing standardized methods for evaluating the performance of emerging materials.
- Sharing these new capabilities with industry partners through open dissemination and collaboration to build a national consensus that shapes the UK’s input into international standards committees and strengthen its role in developing international standards for advanced novel semiconductor technologies and the processes to support their application in industry.
“The semiconductor industry is evolving rapidly, driving breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing and advanced electronics. To compete globally, the UK must harness its strengths in research, innovation and precision measurement,” says Gareth Edwards, head of Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Strategy at NPL. “Standards are key — they provide the framework that ensures reliability, interoperability and confidence across complex supply chains,” he adds.
“This project brings together NPL’s metrology expertise with the technical capabilities of UK academia and industry to define standards for next-generation semiconductors. By doing so, we give the UK a strong global voice in shaping how these technologies are developed and adopted, strengthening supply chains, attracting investment and enabling British innovation to lead internationally.”
Through extensive consultation between 2023 and 2025, NPL and its partners have identified three application areas where the UK can have the greatest global impact and on which the project will focus:
- Power Electronics – Driven by demand for electric vehicles and sustainable energy systems, this field relies on materials such as GaAs, SiC and GaN. Yet, there are currently no independent methods to verify key aspects of manufacturing, such as in-process defect detection and high-voltage reliability.
- Radio Frequency (RF) Communications – The need for power-efficient, high-frequency communications devices in space and defence continues to rise, demanding new methods to verify performance at ever-higher operating frequencies.
- Optoelectronics – Advances in display, lighting, sensing, photovoltaics and optical communications all depend on new light-transmitting materials. Characterising their performance is vital to speeding up adoption and deployment.
“By supporting the establishment of cutting-edge measurement capabilities at the National Physical Laboratory, we're accelerating the UK's role in producing vital next-generation compound semiconductors and building greater resilience in our supply chains for critical technologies,” comments Kanishka Narayan MP, the UK Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, with responsibility for intellectual property.
