UK pledges £5 million to research the future of electronics manufacturing

The UK's plastic electronics industry could receive a boost in research funding under the Technology Strategy Board's new Manufacturing for Electronic Systems of Future programme. The initiative has a total of £4.75 million (€5.8 million) to pass on to UK companies, academic or research organisations and consortia for various types of project to run over the next two years.

The principal focus of the TSB programme is to explore novel manufacturing processes to promote early exploitation and effective scaling up of production to safeguard the future of the British electronics industry, which at £78 billion per annum accounts for 5% of the country's GDP.

Among the priority topics the TSB has identified to steer research towards are several that either directly or indirectly concern plastic electronics. These include, methods to manufacture complex flexible substrates for high-density electronics, integrating printed and conventional electronics, and new ways of embedding sensors or high-tolerance components into materials, like substrates.

The main focus of the programme is to establish collaborative business-led R&D studies; companies of coalitions working on these could choose to be supported by an outside team of designers at the initial stage. R&D projects are expected to last no more than two years and have maximum costs of £500,000. Organisations will be required to secure 50% of the funding for these themselves, for small or medium size enterprises (SMEs) the board's contribution may rise to 60%.

The process for accessing the funds for R&D work opened on 17 February, a briefing day will be held on 26 February. Initial applications must be submitted by 26 March, there will then be a second phase for projects chosen to move forward which will close on 29 May. Applications for the preliminary supported design phase have closed already.

The TSB says it will give particular interest to ideas which enhance lifecycle efficiency or end-of-life processing and are providing access to Horizons, a free sustainability assessment tool, to allow these benefits to be recorded.

For the feasibility studies £750,000 is being set aside, again on a matched funding basis. The studies should run for nine months and cost no more than £75,000; industry can receive 65% of this from the TSB allocation or 75% if they are SMEs. The final application deadline for these is on 2 April 2014.