In 1996, the world was entering a new digital era. The Internet was beginning to move into homes and businesses, mobile phones were becoming increasingly commonplace, and semiconductors were rapidly becoming the critical enabling technology behind communications, computing, and consumer electronics.
It was in this environment that the National Microelectronics Institute (NMI), the organisation that would later become TechWorks, was founded to support the UK’s semiconductor and microelectronics industry.
Thirty years later, the transformation is extraordinary. Digital technology now underpins almost every part of industry and society, while semiconductors sit at the heart of AI, communications, mobility, energy, defence, healthcare, and the connected world. TechWorks has evolved alongside that change, growing from its semiconductor roots into a deeptech industry association supporting more than 300 companies across chip design, manufacturing and packaging, electronic and software systems, cyber security, AI, and emerging technologies.
1996-2000: supporting the digital society
When NMI was established in 1996, the UK was home to a thriving semiconductor industry, with world-leading companies including Motorola, NEC, Siemens, and GEC Plessey Semiconductors operating major design and manufacturing facilities across the country.
At the same time, the Internet was beginning its transition from specialist technology to mass-market infrastructure and mobile communications were expanding rapidly. As demand for semiconductors grew across computing, communications, and consumer electronics, NMI brought together industry, academia, and government, creating a collaborative voice for the sector and helping strengthen the UK’s international competitiveness.
2001-2005: the rise of broadband, 3G, and fabless design
The early 2000s brought broadband Internet, 3G mobile networks, and the rapid expansion of digital services. In the semiconductor world, the fabless model grew quickly, allowing small innovative companies to focus on chip design and grow rapidly, while outsourcing manufacturing to specialist foundries. The UK emerged as a global centre for semiconductor design and IP, led by companies such as Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR), Wolfson Microelectronics, Videologic, and Element 14, while Arm developed processor architectures which powered the mobile revolution.
Recognising this, NMI established NMI-Design to support the growing chip-design community. By 2005, specialist engineering networks covered analogue and RF design, digital design and verification, embedded software, design-for-manufacture and test, packaging, and fabless operations. In each area, engineers from competing companies shared expertise and knowledge to tackle common technical and operational challenges.
2006-2010: smartphones and the shift to systems
The arrival of the smartphone era, app-based services, and Cloud computing changed both consumer behaviour and the technology industry. Semiconductors were no longer viewed simply as components inside electronic products: increasing performance, connectivity, and software complexity meant that innovation was moving up the stack into complete electronic systems.
The same shift was increasingly clear in automotive, where electronics and software were becoming central to vehicle performance, safety, connectivity, and overall user experience. NMI’s activities began to extend beyond individual semiconductor devices towards the system-level engineering challenges shared by chip companies, electronics suppliers, and product manufacturers.
In 2010, NMI responded to a dramatic decline in UK electronic engineering graduates by launching the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF), an industry-led initiative supported by Government, the engineering skills body SEMTA, Arm, CSR, Dialog Semi, and others. Bringing together industry, universities, and government, UKESF used school outreach, summer schools, industry scholarships, and work placements to encourage more young people into electronics to build a stronger pipeline of industry-ready engineers. UKESF subsequently became independent and gained charitable status in 2013.
2011-2015: connected systems and cybersecurity
In 2012, AESIN – the Automotive Electronics Innovation Network – was launched to bring together organisations across the automotive electronics and software ecosystem. It connected semiconductor companies, vehicle manufacturers, engineering organisations, and technology providers around shared challenges in increasingly complex electronic systems and developed close links with the Automotive Council and wider UK automotive innovation community.
As billions of devices began to connect to the Internet, security became an equally important challenge. Following an industry summit at Bletchley Park, the IoT Security Foundation (IoTSF) was launched in 2015 to promote security best practice, collaboration and greater resilience across the rapidly expanding Internet of Things. Together, these communities reflected a wider change: semiconductor innovation was becoming inseparable from systems engineering, software, connectivity, and security.
2016-2020: TechWorks and the connected world
In 2017, NMI relaunched under the TechWorks name, creating an umbrella for a growing family of specialist ‘Connected Communities’. The change reflected the increasing convergence of technologies and industries: the challenges facing semiconductor manufacturers, chip designers, automotive engineers, cybersecurity specialists, and emerging technology companies increasingly crossed traditional sector boundaries.
By the end of the decade, those interdependencies were also exposing new risks. Trade tensions and changing global supply chains increased concern over access to critical technologies, while the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 demonstrated how shortages of relatively low-cost semiconductor components could halt production of high-value products. Chips had moved from the background of industrial policy to become a strategic economic issue.
2021-2026: strategic technologies, resilience, and AI
The years since the pandemic have seen semiconductor capability, advanced computing, and resilient technology supply chains move firmly onto government agendas around the world. In the UK, the National Semiconductor Strategy was published in 2023 and the UK Semiconductor Centre launched in 2026, reflecting a broader recognition that semiconductor design, manufacturing, packaging, skills, and supply chain capability are strategically important to economic growth and national resilience.
TechWorks has increasingly contributed to that debate through its Semiconductor Leadership Group and a series of industry-led advocacy programmes. Its work has examined the UK’s long-term opportunities in chip design and specialist semiconductor manufacturing, as well as the economic and strategic importance of the wider semiconductor value chain. In 2026, TechWorks also helped deliver the latest UK Government-commissioned Semiconductor Sector Study and published Powering Tomorrow: UK Semiconductors 2026, highlighting an industry generating £10.6 billion in annual revenues with the potential to exceed £17 billion by 2030.
Alongside policy work, TechWorks communities have continued to focus on the technologies where the UK has distinctive industrial strengths. This has included work on wide-bandgap semiconductors and power electronic systems; the creation of an advanced packaging group spanning chip design and fabrication to address opportunities in heterogeneous integration and chiplets; a sustainability group focused on reducing the environmental impact of electronics manufacturing; and development of the UK Software-Defined Vehicle Ecosystem & Strategy Roadmap in close collaboration with the Automotive Council.
The organisation has also worked in emerging areas where trust and cross-sector collaboration are becoming critical. TechWorks developed a trust framework for embedded AI systems (Trustable AI Bill of Materials – TAIBOM), to help document, verify, and manage the composition and risk of AI systems across complex supply chains, with support from organisations including BSI and BAE Systems.
Most recently, the Women in TechWorks initiative launched in 2025 has extended the community model into workforce development and mentoring. Internationally, TechWorks has also developed strategic relationships with technology ecosystems in Canada, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Across three decades, the common thread has remained remarkably consistent: bringing together industry, academia, and government around shared technical and commercial challenges. What has changed is the scale and interconnectedness of those challenges. The journey from microelectronics to semiconductors, electronic systems, cyber security, and AI mirrors the evolution of the technology industry itself – from individual components to intelligent, connected, and increasingly software-defined systems.
Charles Sturman, CEO of TechWorks, said: “In 1996, our industry was largely defined by semiconductor devices. Today, innovation happens across an interconnected value-chain from materials science through electronic or photonic processes, software and AI to secure intelligent systems. TechWorks has evolved with that change, but our purpose has remained constant: bringing industry together to solve shared challenges and turn UK technology innovation into economic growth.”
This evolution will be brought together at the Semiconductors to Systems Summit 2026 on 26th August in London, the centrepiece of TechWorks’ 30th anniversary year. Delivered in partnership with the UK Semiconductor Centre, S2S26 will bring together more than 600 leaders from over 300 companies across semiconductor design and manufacturing, electronic systems, cybersecurity, AI, and deeptech scale-up – connecting the full technology value chain while looking ahead to the technologies and industrial capabilities that will shape the next 30 years.
