As AI hardware increasingly confronts bottlenecks in heat dissipation, data transmission, and heterogeneous integration, the semiconductor industry is searching for new technological approaches. This makes it an especially timely moment to explore the United Kingdom’s decades of expertise in compound semiconductors, quantum technologies, and photonics engineering.
Andy McLean, Chief Executive of the UK Semiconductor Centre, is leading a UK delegation to SEMICON Taiwan 2026 to showcase these capabilities and explore new opportunities for collaboration with Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem.
Established in alignment with the UK’s 2023 National Semiconductor Strategy, the UK Semiconductor Centre is designed to provide a unified voice for the country’s semiconductor ecosystem. McLean sees its mission as advocating for the UK industry, raising international awareness of its capabilities, and building partnerships that can make the UK a more significant part of the global semiconductor ecosystem.
“Worldwide, the UK has got a long history of innovation... What has been less successful is taking this innovation and building it up and scaling it into commercial success for the UK,” McLean said.
Beyond the R&D-Manufacturing Divide: The Opportunity in System Integration
At first glance, the logic behind closer UK-Taiwan semiconductor cooperation appears straightforward: combine the UK’s research and design strengths with Taiwan’s world-class manufacturing capabilities. McLean, however, believes that framing misses an important part of the opportunity.
“The position that I often hear is that the UK is very good at research and development, and Taiwan is very good at manufacturing. And I don’t think that is the complete story,” McLean said. “There’s a bit in the middle, which is called system integration, where you have to take collections of chips, and you have to do system development, including large-scale software... I think the bit that we can partner significantly on is this system integration.”
Taiwan has become a manufacturing hub for global AI infrastructure, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and its broader supply chain working to address the growing demand for higher-performance, more energy-efficient AI systems.
But Taiwan’s strengths extend far beyond semiconductor fabrication. Companies such as Quanta, Wistron, Foxconn, Wiwynn, and Inventec have developed formidable capabilities in system-level development, rapid prototyping, manufacturing, and large-scale software and hardware integration. These companies have also become indispensable partners to global AI leaders such as Nvidia.
“In my experience, particularly during my time at Analog Devices, Taiwanese companies demonstrated an extraordinary ability to scale up software and systems engineering extremely fast,” McLean noted. “While the UK excels in IP and chip design—with Arm being our most famous example—Taiwan’s ecosystem brings the system-level integration that turns discrete silicon into scalable commercial systems.”
For the UK, therefore, Taiwan offers more than manufacturing capacity. It provides an ecosystem capable of taking emerging semiconductor technologies and integrating them into complex, commercially scalable systems.
A Three-Tier Technology Roadmap: AI, Photonics, and Quantum
To bridge the gap between academic innovation and commercial scale, the UK Semiconductor Centre is focusing on three technology horizons where UK intellectual property and research capabilities could intersect with Taiwan’s strengths in manufacturing, packaging, and system integration.
Immediate Term — AI Compute and Advanced Packaging: The most immediate opportunities lie in AI processing architectures, advanced packaging, and data center infrastructure. As AI systems grow larger and more power-hungry, innovation increasingly depends not simply on individual chips but on how processors, memory, networking, cooling, and software are integrated at the system level.
Near Term — Photonics and Optical Interconnects: Around 40% of the UK delegation attending SEMICON Taiwan specializes in photonics, reflecting one of the country’s strongest technology clusters. As electrical interconnects encounter mounting bandwidth, power, and thermal constraints in AI systems, optical technologies could play a growing role in moving data between chips and systems. Combining UK photonics expertise with Taiwan’s advanced heterogeneous integration and packaging capabilities could open new paths toward higher-bandwidth, more energy-efficient AI infrastructure.
Next Horizon — Quantum Computing and Novel Materials: Beyond established compound semiconductor materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), UK research institutions are exploring emerging materials including gallium oxide for next-generation high-voltage power applications. In quantum computing, the UK’s deep foundations in physics, cryogenics, photonics, and quantum technologies could provide fertile ground for joint hardware and system development with Taiwanese partners.
“Now, with all the advanced packaging capabilities where you can use heterogeneous components to build a system, I think the time is now ripe for compound semiconductors to take their place,” McLean said.
The shift toward heterogeneous integration is particularly significant because it allows different semiconductor materials and device technologies to be combined within a single package or system. Rather than requiring one material platform to perform every function, future systems can increasingly integrate silicon logic, compound semiconductors, photonics, memory, and other specialized components according to their respective strengths.
The Scaling Challenge: Capital and Talent
If the UK possesses such deep technological expertise, why has it historically struggled to turn more of its academic and research leadership into multibillion-dollar semiconductor companies?
McLean points to two persistent bottlenecks: capital and talent.
Scaling a semiconductor company from promising technology to commercial manufacturing can require hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Historically, many UK semiconductor startups seeking to scale have relied heavily on foreign capital, including investment from the United States and Taiwan, rather than a sufficiently deep domestic funding ecosystem.
Talent presents another challenge. Fast-growing semiconductor companies need not only leading researchers and chip designers but also a continuous pipeline of engineers, technicians, software developers, and PhD-level specialists capable of turning prototypes into reliable, manufacturable products.
Closer UK-Taiwan academic cooperation could help address part of that challenge. Initiatives involving the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) have supported exchanges that send UK students to Taiwan, with reciprocal visits also planned. Academic leaders such as Professor Themis Prodromakis of the University of Edinburgh are meanwhile working to deepen university-level research collaboration between the two semiconductor ecosystems.
Such exchanges could have benefits beyond workforce development. Giving researchers and engineers greater exposure to Taiwan’s manufacturing and commercialization ecosystem could help UK innovators better understand what is required to move technologies from the laboratory into volume production.
Discovering the Breadth of the UK Pavilion at SEMICON Taiwan
For Taiwanese semiconductor executives, engineers, investors, and system integrators attending SEMICON Taiwan 2026, McLean has a simple message: look beyond the household names.
“We have dozens of companies in the UK, so it’s actually been quite a challenge to select who we should bring to showcase,” he said. “I would encourage people not just to look at the big names that have been well publicized, but to look at the breadth and scope that we have coming out of the UK. That’s really the takeaway I would hope that people would get.”
That breadth could become increasingly relevant as the semiconductor industry enters a period in which progress can no longer depend primarily on shrinking transistor dimensions.
AI infrastructure is pushing the industry toward a more heterogeneous future—one in which computing, memory, photonics, advanced packaging, power electronics, cooling, and software must increasingly be optimized as an integrated system.
The UK brings deep capabilities in fundamental research, semiconductor IP, compound materials, photonics, and emerging quantum technologies. Taiwan brings an extraordinary ability to manufacture, integrate, iterate, and scale complex technologies into commercial systems.
As AI infrastructure shifts from raw compute scaling toward system-wide optimization of power, heat, and data movement, the intersection of those strengths could create a particularly fertile area for UK-Taiwan semiconductor collaboration—and potentially help shape the next generation of computing infrastructure.
Very good article indeed. Capital and talent requires VC, that is what UK lacks of.😱🥵