Bristol is home to several major technology companies and research institutions and has a thriving innovation ecosystem in the aerospace and defence industries, where telecoms hardware is routinely used.
The Future Telecoms Hub will also link CSA Catapult activities across CSconnected, the world’s first compound semiconductor cluster in South Wales, and the Western Gateway, the UK’s first pan-regional partnership that brings together local leaders from two countries.
As part of its 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy, the UK government has set an ambition to provide most of the UK population with a 5G signal by 2027 and to create a more diverse and competitive supply chain for telecoms networks.
Driven by the growth of 5G networks and the adoption of next-generation technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things, the telecoms hardware market is forecast to grow in the coming years — the global telecom equipment market accounted for $538.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $967.9 billion by 2030, with a considerable CAGR of 6.9%.
CSA Catapult is already engaged in several projects helping to build safe and secure sovereign supply chains in the UK’s telecoms hardware space, such as ORanGaN and Secure5G.
The Secure 5G project is building a flexible platform that will enable companies to roll out and maintain their own quantum-safe private networks, with targeted applications for Industry 4.0, mobile edge computing (MEC), the Internet of Things (IoT) and highly secure environments, such as defence.
The ORanGaN project is looking to develop a sovereign UK supply chain, manufacturing processes and packaging solutions for radio frequency gallium nitride (RF-GaN) devices that are critical to 5G communications systems electronics hardware.
Devices made using compound semiconductors will increasingly be at the heart of a new breed of advanced electronics needed to meet demand for digital services. Networks which exploit compound semiconductors will have lower latency, greater flexibility, even greater capacity and provide affordable access for everyone.