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21/11/2008
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It's 10 years since the ISLI was set up as part of the Alba Centre. What has it achieved and where is it headed?
 Twenty, even 30, years ago, Scotland had a reasonably robust electronics industry. It was home to pc manufacturers such as IBM and Compaq, and boasted fabs run by Motorola, National Semiconductor and NEC. Business was, as they say, booming.
But times change quickly in the electronics world. Scotland became a less attractive place for ‘screwdriver’ operations and fab investments went elsewhere. The country was left facing a dilemma: should it let the electronics sector wither or embark on another round of inward investment?
The latter route was taken and Scottish Enterprise set about making Scotland a leading microelectronics region.
A central plank of this strategy was the Alba Centre in Livingston. The Alba Centre, the thinking went, would be a centre of microelectronics design excellence acting as a magnet for larger companies. Smaller companies would benefit from ‘rubbing shoulders’ with industry leaders.
Cadence was the lead inward investor and planned to house some 2000 engineers at the site. But the anticipated stream of investments failed to materialise, Cadence changed its plans and it’s the Alba Centre that has withered.
But there is a success story; the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Tony Harker, ISLI chief executive, gave the context. “ISLI was founded in 1998 on the back of inward investment. Scottish Enterprise recognised that it needed to build a workforce which could service the needs of inward investors. It asked Scottish universities what they could do and encouraged them to collaborate. The result was ISLI; the first centre of excellence to concentrate on silicon.”
Harker says ISLI’s relationship with the four founding universities – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Herriot Watt and Strathclyde – allows it to draw on expertise where it resides. “For example, we can access computer science, electrical and electronic engineering, software and hardware skills and combine these in true systems.”
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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