Research to feed technology

Consider the humble sandwich. In essence, it constitutes a simple system: a bread package protecting a filling of your choice, most likely with some interfacial lubricant in the form of butter or margarine. Three well-understood components.

But say you want to improve your sandwich. You could get a baker to modify the bread at the material level, but the baker would not understand jam-making, or dairy products. To improve the whole system you need to work with other experts.

In October building work began at the University of Cambridge on a centre that will bring together just such a spectrum of expertise, in photonics and electronics, from materials, to components, to systems. In fact, the mass and breadth of research capability soon to be sitting side by side on the west of the city is remarkable.

Professor Milne

"There would be places that I'm sure do have these facilities but not in the same centre," says Professor Bill Milne, who is leading the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) project. "There's fantastic photonics systems capability and MEMS [micro electromechanical systems] capability and carbon nanotube capability [around the world], so all the stuff that we do in displays. But I'm not sure that they have it under the same umbrella like we're going to have."

CAPE will house the existing Centre for Molecular Materials for Photonics and Electronics (CMMPE), and put the Electrical Engineering department next door to the physicists in the famous Cavendish Laboratory. Just down the road is the Bill Gates-sponsored Computer Science Laboratory.

On one corner of the Cavendish is the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre, which hosts the Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) on Nanotechnology. On the other is Hitachi Labs Cambridge, and the Microelectronics Research Centre, both of which concentrate on novel device structures, including quantum effects, and develop ultra-fine lithographic techniques. If you want multi-disciplinary, that is what you have got.

"Interdisciplinary research is not just trendy," says Milne. "In our case we've always done it anyway. Since we're an integrated lab the interdisciplinary aspects have always been there."

Nevertheless, there has been an undoubted shift in the calls put out by funding bodies for research proposals favouring those that adopt a multi-disciplined approach, for example physics and biology for novel devices and computational paradigms. Part of the drive is from an increased interest in complex biological systems, and developments in the processing power and techniques needed to investigate them. If it continues, Cambridge is clearly in one of the box seats.

And if one of the boxes belongs to the multi-discipline disciples, another might belong to the industrial collaborators. Milne, who is head of electronic devices and materials research at Cambridge, also thinks that academic research should be carried out in close association with industry, a model successfully pioneered by the German Fraunhofer Institutes.

It'll look something like this...

To that end, the £14.4m CAPE is being developed with support from Dow Corning, Alps and Marconi. Completion is due in early 2006. "The industrial involvement is going to help a lot, it's absolutely vital to how this operates," he says.

These are encouraging developments, with a UK university, albeit an already very successful one, pushing forward the way it goes about its research to keep pace with both changing academic demands and commercial realities. Companies clearly find it very attractive.

"Put simply there is an outstanding concentration of good science in the UK," says Dr Stephen Bold, managing director of Sharp Laboratories of Europe, which is based on the Oxford Science Park. "As you can imagine we have excellent links with Oxford University, and we have the Rutherford Appleton laboratory just down the road, but within two hours we can be in Imperial, Cambridge, Southampton, Warwick, Birmingham and so on."

The UK benefits economically from this high quality research base in two main ways, says Bold, neither of which are clearly understood. The first is research itself as a business.

"Sharp Laboratories of Europe employs 100 scientists and engineers in the UK," says Bold. "That is good for the economy and the health of science in the UK. We provide exciting, well rewarded jobs."

The other is research as a generator of new products. "New product development is vital to the success of almost every business, and research is by far the biggest generator of technology for new products," he says. "Obviously new products generate new jobs. Some of those products will be produced in the UK."

As Bill Milne describes it, Cambridge manages to cover the entire length of this "food-chain": materials, components, systems, products. The cross-fertilisation of ideas between individual researchers is helped simply by the physical closeness of different laboratories.

After all, you never know what a biologist will say to a physicist over a cup of tea and one of those three-component systems we like to call sandwiches. onsider the humble sandwich. In essence, it constitutes a simple system: a bread package protecting a filling of your choice, most likely with some interfacial lubricant in the form of butter or margarine. Three well-understood components.

But say you want to improve your sandwich. You could get a baker to modify the bread at the material level, but the baker would not understand jam-making, or dairy products. To improve the whole system you need to work with other experts.

In October building work began at the University of Cambridge on a centre that will bring together just such a spectrum of expertise, in photonics and electronics, from materials, to components, to systems. In fact, the mass and breadth of research capability soon to be sitting side by side on the west of the city is remarkable.

"There would be places that I'm sure do have these facilities but not in the same centre," says Professor Bill Milne, who is leading the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) project. "There's fantastic photonics systems capability and MEMS [micro electromechanical systems] capability and carbon nanotube capability [around the world], so all the stuff that we do in displays. But I'm not sure that they have it under the same umbrella like we're going to have."

CAPE will house the existing Centre for Molecular Materials for Photonics and Electronics (CMMPE), and put the Electrical Engineering department next door to the physicists in the famous Cavendish Laboratory. Just down the road is the Bill Gates-sponsored Computer Science Laboratory.

On one corner of the Cavendish is the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre, which hosts the Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) on Nanotechnology. On the other is Hitachi Labs Cambridge, and the Microelectronics Research Centre, both of which concentrate on novel device structures, including quantum effects, and develop ultra-fine lithographic techniques. If you want multi-disciplinary, that is what you have got.

"Interdisciplinary research is not just trendy," says Milne. "In our case we've always done it anyway. Since we're an integrated lab the interdisciplinary aspects have always been there."

Nevertheless, there has been an undoubted shift in the calls put out by funding bodies for research proposals favouring those that adopt a multi-disciplined approach, for example physics and biology for novel devices and computational paradigms. Part of the drive is from an increased interest in complex biological systems, and developments in the processing power and techniques needed to investigate them. If it continues, Cambridge is clearly in one of the box seats.

And if one of the boxes belongs to the multi-discipline disciples, another might belong to the industrial collaborators. Milne, who is head of electronic devices and materials research at Cambridge, also thinks that academic research should be carried out in close association with industry, a model successfully pioneered by the German Fraunhofer Institutes.

To that end, the £14.4m CAPE is being developed with support from Dow Corning, Alps and Marconi. Completion is due in early 2006. "The industrial involvement is going to help a lot, it's absolutely vital to how this operates," he says.

These are encouraging developments, with a UK university, albeit an already very successful one, pushing forward the way it goes about its research to keep pace with both changing academic demands and commercial realities. Companies clearly find it very attractive.

"Put simply there is an outstanding concentration of good science in the UK," says Dr Stephen Bold, managing director of Sharp Laboratories of Europe, which is based on the Oxford Science Park. "As you can imagine we have excellent links with Oxford University, and we have the Rutherford Appleton laboratory just down the road, but within two hours we can be in Imperial, Cambridge, Southampton, Warwick, Birmingham and so on."

The UK benefits economically from this high quality research base in two main ways, says Bold, neither of which are clearly understood. The first is research itself as a business.

"Sharp Laboratories of Europe employs 100 scientists and engineers in the UK," says Bold. "That is good for the economy and the health of science in the UK. We provide exciting, well rewarded jobs."

The other is research as a generator of new products. "New product development is vital to the success of almost every business, and research is by far the biggest generator of technology for new products," he says. "Obviously new products generate new jobs. Some of those products will be produced in the UK."

As Bill Milne describes it, Cambridge manages to cover the entire length of this "food-chain": materials, components, systems, products. The cross-fertilisation of ideas between individual researchers is helped simply by the physical closeness of different laboratories.

After all, you never know what a biologist will say to a physicist over a cup of tea and one of those three-component systems we like to call sandwiches.

www.clo.cam.ac.uk