The EPPIC Challenge

One of the primary objectives of Faraday Partnerships is the communication of industry needs and priorities to the academic partners. This ensures that research proposals and funded programmes are directed to providing solutions to real problems in industry. This benefits the academic partners as well as industry by providing them with more active industry support and a higher chance that their work will eventually be commercialised.

At the commencement of EPPIC, participating companies were asked to list their priority areas where they would like to see additional research. These were collated into a Research Priorities list and the initial Core Research programmes were designed to address some of these priorities.

As the co-operation between industry and academic partners increased, an idea developed to provide a more tangible expression of industry needs in the form of a ‘demonstrator’ module incorporating all the features identified in the research priorities list – see diagram below.

The all-embracing concept demonstrator illustrated would be too complex to be practical to manufacture in its entirety. However, the idea is being further developed to define a number of simpler demonstrators covering specific technology areas (e.g. high speed electronics) that would be used to provide practical feasibility demonstrations of the results of research programmes. Further information on the current status of the EPPIC Challenge can be found in the Industry Steering Group area of the website (access for ISG members).