It may be big by British standards, but the £4 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for Cambridge to work on "a new generation of tiny semiconductors" looks tiny alongside the money that went to their "rivals" in New York State. Still, British scientists pride themselves that they throw brain power at problems while Americans bombard them with money.
You can certainly do a lot of science in Cambridge with £4 million. The research group there, in the Cavendish Laboratory, also has the advantage of a Professor who picked up a knighthood in the New Year Honours list.
Michael Pepper is the Principal Investigator on the four-year project and head of the Semiconductor Physics Group at the Cavendish. The grant is for work on the electronics underlying quantum computing. The announcement of the grant quotes him as saying: "We are not talking about speeding up reactions by a factor of two or three, but by a factor of billions! Currently computing operations happen in sequence. With the new technology they will happen in parallel."
Like his colleague along the corridor, Professor Sir Richard Friend, founder of both Cambridge Display Technology and Plastic Logic, Professor Pepper is something of a spinner out of businesses. He was one of the founders of Teraview, a company that is moving imaging into new parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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