With Scottish Enterprise selling off its stake in the Alba Centre, the intention of creating a world class centre of excellence for chip design and IP development employing 6,000 people has been abandoned.
As recently as 2003 it was suggested that Scotland's Alba Centre could spearhead Government plans to expand the UK's electronics industry. This followed a report from the House of Lords science and technology select committee which called for teh creation of a national centre of excellence in IC design.
“It was set up to develop high-level SoC technology but because of the downturn in that sector in 2000, it hasn’t attracted big companies as hoped,” a spokesman for Scottish Enterprise told EW. “Cadence was the flagship tenant but they had to scale back their interest substantially.”
At that time Cadence was also asked to pay back some of the grants it received from Scottish Enterprise.
What is left at the Alba centre is the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) which has a £15m grant from the DTI, for work it is doing with Semefab, and an incubator service which currently has ten companies.
A successful product of the incubator was Oligon, founded by former Kymata executive Richard Laming, and sold to Wolfson Microelectronics for £2.9m earlier this year.
Scottish Enterprise is thought to have got about £8m for its stake from its original joint venture partner, Miller developments, which now owns the site entirely and is expected to run it as a general purpose industrial estate.