The Bristol and South West semiconductor cluster

The University of Bristol's Centre for Device Thermography and Reliability, established in 2001, is the region's most distinctive facility: it characterises the thermal behaviour and reliability of wide- and ultra-wide-bandgap devices in gallium nitride, gallium oxide and diamond, using electrical testing, thermography, ultrafast laser and nanoscale characterisation laboratories, with metal-organic chemical vapour deposition growth capability alongside. The university's shared cleanroom adds wafer-scale micro- and nanofabrication, including electron-beam lithography and reactive-ion etching.

Power electronics research is organised through REWIRE, an £11 million UK Research and Innovation Innovation and Knowledge Centre led by Bristol with partners at Cambridge and Warwick, announced in February 2024 and running to 2029, focused on wide and ultra-wide-bandgap devices for net-zero applications with industrial partners across automotive, energy and equipment.

For companies, the Quantum Technologies Innovation Centre on the University of Bristol's Temple Quarter campus provides laboratory and office space for quantum and deep-technology businesses, supported by £35 million of local growth funding, and several photonics and quantum companies in our index are based there. The Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult also runs a Future Telecoms Hub at Bristol and Bath Science Park, opened in 2023, with radio-frequency, photonics and quantum communications testbeds.

The University of Bristol is the principal research anchor, spanning device physics and reliability, wide-bandgap power electronics, quantum engineering and integrated photonics, and hosting doctoral training in quantum engineering. Its spinout record is the main reason the region's photonics company base has grown quickly.

Nearby institutions add fabrication access. The University of Bath operates the David Bullett Nanofabrication Facility, a user-access cleanroom with thin-film deposition, etching and lithography. The University of Exeter runs cleanroom facilities within its quantum systems and nanomaterials centre, available to commercial as well as academic users. We have not been able to confirm dedicated semiconductor fabrication facilities at UWE Bristol, so none are claimed here.

In February 2024 UK Research and Innovation announced £26.8 million to establish two national semiconductor Innovation and Knowledge Centres, one of them REWIRE at Bristol for high-voltage and wide-bandgap power electronics, alongside funding for semiconductor skills projects — an allocation made explicitly in delivery of the national semiconductor strategy. The Bristol team subsequently secured further Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funding for aluminium gallium nitride solid-state circuit breaker work.

Quantum and photonics programmes have also brought investment into the region, including Innovate UK Quantum Missions funding in 2025 for a quantum networking hardware demonstrator involving the University of Bristol, the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and photonics companies. Regional analysis commissioned around the cluster has repeatedly identified private investment, rather than research capability, as the constraint on scale-up here.