Dr Wyn Metedith, chair of CSconnected, discusses the UK authorities’s imaginative and prescient for compound semiconductors and the way this fuels the purpose of a sovereign defence functionality.
In September 2024, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) bought a semiconductor foundry in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham. This uncommon step was not a transfer to broaden capability, however to forestall collapse of a vital sovereign provide chain.
The ability, Octric Semiconductors UK, was the one web site within the UK able to manufacturing gallium arsenide chips for army platforms, together with fighter jet avionics. Its earlier homeowners had been seeking to promote or shut it. The federal government intervened as a result of shedding it was deemed a nationwide safety danger.
This extremely reactive transfer was a reminder of how uncovered the UK’s defence industrial base has change into to the lack of vital semiconductor functionality.
The query the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), revealed in 2025, now has to reply is how Britain strikes from reactive disaster administration to proactive sovereign resilience.
Objectives of the Defence Industrial Technique
The DIS units out an formidable reply. Its imaginative and prescient is for the UK to be “a number one tech-enabled defence energy, with an built-in drive that deters, fights, and wins by way of fixed innovation at wartime tempo” by 2035.
As geopolitical tensions proceed to be exacerbated, that ambition feels much less like a long-term technique and extra like an pressing necessity. The technique is equally clear that defence should be an engine for financial development recognising {that a} army is simply ever as robust as the economic base behind it. It names a number of frontier applied sciences, together with semiconductors, AI, cyber and quantum, as precedence areas with each army and financial development potential, committing to lift defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with a longer-term ambition of three.5%.
The proactive reply to the resilience query already exists. It’s constructed, working, and rising in South Wales.
Compound semiconductors as an enabling expertise
With recognition that semiconductors are a precedence provide chain vulnerability, alongside metal, batteries, rare-earth components and energetic supplies, there’s a big alternative to lean into the strengths of CSconnected, the world’s most built-in compound semiconductor cluster, located in South Wales.
Compound semiconductors will not be only one element amongst many in fashionable defence methods, they’re the enabling layer throughout each layer of contemporary defence expertise. Compound semiconductor supplies have a number of makes use of throughout the sector.
Gallium nitride (GaN) powers the high-frequency radio frequency (RF) methods on the coronary heart of radar, digital warfare, and safe communications. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) underpins fighter jet avionics and missile steering, with Indium phosphide (InP) enabling the photonic methods utilized in house and high-speed safe information transmission. Fairly merely, you can’t construct a tech-enabled preventing drive with out them.
The DIS prioritises dual-use expertise because the path to each army benefit and financial development, and right here once more, compound semiconductors are vital enabling parts, performing because the definitive dual-use expertise. Each defence software has a direct business counterpart (RF comms in 5G/6G, energy electronics in EVs and clear power, photonics in AI information centres). This compares straight with tech developments which have come from defence previously, similar to business air journey or the house exploration triggered by defence tech in the course of the Chilly Warfare.
The DIS has dedicated £250M for Defence Development Deal throughout the UK constructed on local-national partnerships to develop sub-sector specialisms whereas delivering sustainable regional development. Collaboration with the South Wales compound semiconductor cluster feels synonymous with advancing each the DIS’s safety and development goals. Moreover, no less than 10% of the Defence gear procurement price range (£289B to 2033) is predicted to be spent on future applied sciences.
With directed power weapons, autonomous methods, and next-generation radars all compound semiconductor dependent, the strategic case for partnership with the South Wales Cluster has by no means been stronger. The UK is at the moment strategically depending on abroad sources for the manufacture of many of those parts.
Creating sovereign resilience throughout the UK
The South Wales Compound Semiconductor Cluster has a wealth of analysis, innovation and manufacturing functionality in compound semiconductors. Cardiff College is famend as a UK centre of excellence within the improvement of Gallium Nitride-based Built-in Circuit expertise (GaN-based IC expertise) for cutting-edge RF communications, with a complementary £100M funding in large-scale, RF and Photonic chip fabrication services on the Institute for Compound Semiconductors. Swansea College has invested over £80M in new services to place itself because the UK pilot for SiC and GaN Energy element applied sciences on the Centre for Built-in Semiconductor Supplies. Each Universities work carefully with the Compound Semiconductor Centre, a subsidiary of compound semiconductor supplies pioneer IQE, to supply novel compound semiconductor supplies options that underpin the system analysis programmes. The Compound Semiconductor Purposes Catapult has complete services for the design, take a look at and module integration of novel Energy, RF and Photonic element options.
This extremely built-in innovation ecosystem feeds a large-scale core industrial manufacturing base, offering the UK’s solely totally built-in compound semiconductor provide chain, from wafer development by way of to system manufacturing and packaging, with world gamers similar to IQE, Vishay, KLA and Microchip making Newport, Cardiff and Caldicot their manufacturing operations’ UK dwelling.
A burgeoning SME neighborhood can be evolving both to service the core, or to reap the benefits of the analysis, improvement and innovation (RD&I) infrastructure, similar to Microlink Units, which produces twin use compound semiconductor gadgets with direct aerospace and purposes, and Area Forge, who’re growing space-based manufacturing options for ultra-high high quality semiconductor supplies. Additionally Novomorphic, a semiconductor design firm specialising in AI, defence and aerospace.
For the final ten years, members of the compound semiconductor cluster have been collaborating to construct a coordinated supporting regional ecosystem with a classy semiconductor expertise and abilities supply programme, unrivalled RD&I infrastructure, and incentives to broaden and upskill the native provide chain. The cluster has grown to assist 3,000 jobs on this interval and has a relentless give attention to additional development with the ambition to assist 6,000 jobs and £1billion industrial output by 2030. This established base of expertise and infrastructure, already recognized within the DIS regional defence cluster map, is among the few locations within the UK that may take a defence-critical compound semiconductor requirement from specification to production-ready element inside one geography.
It’s these well-established strengths that present the muse for the Wales Defence Development Deal, signed at Cardiff Fortress by Defence Secretary John Healey, First Minister Eluned Morgan and Secretary of State for Wales Jo Stevens in February, which commits £50 million to positioning Wales because the UK’s major launchpad for autonomous defence expertise. It widens entry to MOD take a look at ranges, together with at MOD Aberporth, expands air corridors throughout central Wales for uncrewed aerial methods testing, and commits to establishing a brand new Defence Technical Excellence Faculty by September 2027. Critically, it removes the long-standing barrier that required Welsh SMEs to entry safe defence contracts by way of prime contractors, a structural change that straight opens the door for cluster firms to interact with MoD procurement at a scale beforehand unavailable to them.
Main the way in which within the Wales Defence and Safety Cluster
CSconnected is a steering group member of the Wales Defence and Safety Cluster (WDSC), which launched in Cardiff on 9 March 2026. Backed by the Ministry of Defence and the Defence and Safety Accelerator, and a part of a UK-wide community of regional defence clusters, the WDSC brings collectively authorities, trade, academia and SMEs with a single goal: to speed up innovation, strengthen provide chains, and join Welsh functionality to nationwide and worldwide defence and safety necessities. For CSconnected, steering group membership isn’t a symbolic gesture. It’s a strategic platform by way of which the compound semiconductor cluster can interact straight with the defence prime contractors already working in Wales: Thales, Airbus, Raytheon, Normal Dynamics, QinetiQ, and Babcock. These are the system integrators whose platforms depend upon the parts the cluster produces. The WDSC creates a structured discussion board to align that provide chain intentionally, for the primary time.
The dimensions of the chance the WDSC makes seen is placing. Welsh semiconductor output is roughly £500 million per yr, however 90% of it’s at the moment exported. The cluster is already producing at vital quantity and world-class high quality. What has been lacking is the structured demand sign and provide chain alignment wanted to redirect a better proportion of that output towards UK sovereign defence necessities. The query is whether or not will probably be resourced and empowered to take action on the tempo the Defence Funding Plan calls for?
Constructing sovereign functionality in South Wales
The compound semiconductor cluster supplies a gateway for the UK to construct the world-leading sovereign functionality that underpins its clear power transition, its defence resilience, its AI infrastructure, and its superior manufacturing base. That gateway is open, working, and rising in South Wales proper now.
The Wales Defence Development Deal has been signed. The Wales Defence and Safety Cluster launched on 9 March. The Defence Provide Chain Functionality Programme is dwell. The coverage structure to attach the compound semiconductor cluster to the UK’s defence industrial ambitions has by no means been extra full.
What is required now’s tempo. With 90% of Welsh semiconductor output at the moment exported, the sovereign alternative is being realised elsewhere.
Authorities funding choices on provide chain alignment, expertise roadmaps, and procurement entry should be made with the urgency the worldwide semiconductor race calls for, and with the popularity that the asset wanted to ship on the Defence Industrial Technique’s most formidable goals are already constructed, already confirmed, and able to scale.
