Scottish Enterprise raised a few eyebrows last February when it decided to sell its stake in the Alba Centre.

Funding of a semiconductor design campus in Scotland may no longer be on the agenda of the politicians in Holyrood, but the Scottish design community seems to be flourishing and in many respects the Edinburgh-Glasgow corridor ranks with Cambridge and Bristol as a hotbed of electronics design companies.    

Tony Harker, head of ISLI, the Alba Centre-based training organisation, is a strong advocate of Scotland’s place as a centre for microelectronics design. “Scotland has a strong presence in analogue, mixed signal and systems design. Companies such as Atmel, Epson, Nallatech, National Semiconductor, Selex, STMicroelectronics, Thales, Wolfson and Xilinx are all testimony to this. Complimenting this is a healthy start-up culture which feeds from strong universities,” said Harker.

Who are the designers best suited for Scotland’s start-ups? “Opportunities are there for talented individuals who can demonstrate an ability to work in multifunctional organisations. The niche engineering challenges offered by the mixed signal and embedded systems worlds are still there and promise to stay as we move further into the realms of deep sub micron and higher level integration,” said Harker.

Plexus UK is actively expanding its design team on the Alba Campus in Livingston. “The engineering team here in Livingston is a vital component in our growth plans for Europe. The team provides full engineering support from concept through to final production for a wide variety of customers throughout the region,” said Andy Allen, v-p Europe for Plexus. 

Two designers, Keith Sloway and Georgia Dede have recently been recruited by Plexus, bringing the number of employees based at the Livingston design centre to 21.

Further opportunities exist for both hardware and software engineers. “To meet the ambitious targets we have set ourselves, we still need to recruit further software and hardware engineers and we are actively seeking to fill those positions now,” added Allen.

Sloway is a mechanical engineer with a degree in engineering systems and a post-graduate diploma in IT computer aided engineering from Edinburgh’s Napier University. In addition he is a green belt in Design for Lean Six Sigma.

Dede is a hardware engineer with a degree in electronics engineering from the Technological Institute of Athens and a Masters degree in digital systems engineering from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

As well as carrying design projects for local customers, the Livingston team also develops RF, FPGA and analogue systems for the rest of the group.

“The Alba Centre has been a good magnet for attracting engineers,” said Allen.

See also: the Electronics Weekly focus on jobs in electronics, presenting a roundup of career-related content and a full list of agencies recruiting for the electronics industry.