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Scotland’s burgeoning ecosystem in emerging technologies, from semiconductors, to photonics, to quantum and sensing, is a fascinating one – and the story still has plenty of chapters to be written yet.

A signpost to the ambition, and the joined-up thinking within it, is through Scotland’s Critical Technology Supercluster. The supercluster is a partnership between Technology Scotland, who is the delivery lead, the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, and the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. The goal is to take advantage of Scotland’s existing strengths and synergies across critical technologies, on the theory that the four abovementioned technologies are a single, interconnected pipeline rather than siloed industries.

Central to many of these initiatives is Evelyn Toma who, alongside being Director of Strategy for the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre (JWNC) at the University of Glasgow, sits on the board of Technology Scotland. The goal for the supercluster is to achieve £10 billion turnover by 2035, which Toma confirms is on target and is ‘very achievable.’

“Our industry base is by and large hardware,” explains Toma. “They’ve got the same challenges… [they] share the same skills needs. They need these fast cycles of capital investment to stay at the forefront of their industries and, by and large, they share the same export markets.

“Technology Scotland’s role is to represent that supercluster, to the Scottish and UK governments, to allow the supercluster to talk with one voice so we can impact policy and talk about the most important interventions; but also, to represent the supercluster internationally, to the industrial community that may want to come and invest in Scotland,” Toma adds.

There is plenty of encouragement to invest in Scotland. Take quantum as an example. A paper from QURECA (Quantum Resources and Careers) published in May, titled ‘Inside Scotland’s Quantum Ecosystem’, outlines the rationale neatly. While founder and CEO Dr Araceli Venegas-Gomez may note a little bias as Scotland was QURECA’s birthplace, she noted in her foreword the ‘academic excellence, enabling industrial capability, strong photonics and semiconductor-adjacent strengths, and a collaborative culture that gives [Scotland] unusual potential as a quantum ecosystem.’

Toma paints a broadly similar picture. Looking at photonics – because as she notes, you can’t talk about quantum without talking about photonics – Scotland is home to the second largest photonics cluster in the UK outside southeast England. “That cluster has been working together for 15 years,” says Toma.

Throw in the neat trick of consistently winning Innovate-type funding through the likes of Fraunhofer UK – Scotland “completely punches above its weight” in that department, says Toma – and the community aspect of the universities and companies all talking to each other and working together, and you have a recipe for success. “I think that’s what makes Scotland so special… the concentration of all of that,” says Toma.

Where the JWMC comes in, alongside its commercial arm Kelvin Nanotechnology (KNT), is in building those foundations: prototypes and production services for industry, alongside training large cohorts of PhDs. While, as an academic open access fab, any company can use the facilities, most companies opt to commission KNT to build out their proposition.

Keeping with the photonics theme, one of KNT’s major clients supply tens of millions of lasers into fibre optics and optical communications, as well as AI data centre applications. The university’s expertise in electron beam technologies and laser manufacture is long-standing. “KNT anchors a part of the global supply chain for lasers here in the UK”, explains Toma.

“What makes it exciting for me is the fact there’s a lot of public money invested in research, there’s a lot of public money invested into our equipment set, and because of the way KNT operates, it allows industry to truly benefit from that public investment and exploit the hard work done by the academics on processes, and devices that KNT can then translate out into services for industry to produce real money, for companies,” Toma adds.

A recent success story is that of Quantcore, a University of Glasgow quantum spinoff whose investors include Scottish Enterprise and whose executives include Prof Martin Wiedes, who works alongside Toma as Director at JWNC. Quantcore focuses on advancements in quantum manufacturing – as Toma puts it, it is a ‘foundry service for qubits’ – and last month scooped the qBIG Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics.

Toma notes the ‘wonderful’ story of how Quantcore came about, with JWNC and KNT at its heart. “Martin wins grants, he develops his qubits with his academic team and KNT, they get something that they think’s got real differentiation in the market, because they use slightly different production processes and materials to implement the qubits than what is used today,” says Toma. “Then they work with the commercialisation arm of the university, get some work done to assess their technology, and it becomes a spinout.

“They’re clearly early stages in terms of funding… all the research work’s been done in the JWNC with KNT as part of that.  Now Quantcore are the product source, using the JWNC for manufacturing as like many companies today, Quantcore are fabless and need access to reliable manufacture” she adds.

But what about putting it all together? The latest chapter to be written in Scotland’s ecosystem is the Critical Technologies Nanofabrication Facility (CTNF). Toma is programme director of the proposed facility, which has a location selected and is currently going through design, and she explains why she’s excited by its potential.

“The UK is really well known for our strengths in research, and we’ve got lots of great startups and SMEs with great ideas, but we are poor when it comes to the commercialisation and actually realising true economic value from these ideas,” says Toma. “The government’s done all sorts of studies and one of the conclusions they’ve come to is that we don’t have good scale-up infrastructure in the UK that can take, for example, an SME from a great idea to commercialisation.

“That’s the gap that we are proposing to fill with the CTNF,” Toma adds. “[It] will be based on the same successful model that we have with the JWNC, but it’s a wholly new facility that will basically create new low-volume production capacity for UK SMEs and startups.

“What it will allow the UK to do on the fab side  is keep all of the value chain in the UK for low volume, high value niche applications, which the UK [is] really good at, but also for the bigger applications like AI, it will allow us to really seed the market with thousands of devices, and then when the very high volumes kick in, then it can be transferred to either another fab in the UK or… Europe, or even Asia, because by that time the value has been created and the position in the market has been established.”