Beyond silicon: how compound semiconductors are sparking industry innovation

When the UK government announced a £63 million boost for Britain’s electric vehicle revolution in July 2025, promising thousands of new charge points for homes, businesses, and local councils, it sounded like another confident step towards a cleaner transport future. Behind the scenes, success will depend on something far less visible: a thriving semiconductor industry capable of powering that shift efficiently, reliably, and at scale.

The semiconductor industry may not grab headlines like AI or EVs, but it underpins both. Every charger, inverter, and powertrain depends on components that manage electricity efficiently, and it’s here that compound semiconductors, made from materials such as gallium nitride, silicon carbide and even diamond, are starting to outshine traditional silicon.

Able to handle higher voltages and temperatures with lower energy loss, they’re key to scaling up electric vehicle infrastructure and cutting waste across the grid. It’s no surprise, then, that the announcement of a new UK Semiconductor Centre and a national skills programme for chip design earlier this year was framed as part of a broader industrial push, to strengthen sovereign capability and secure supply chains for this new class of materials.

Few understand that opportunity better than Professor Martin Kuball, Director of the Centre for Device Thermography and Reliability at the University of Bristol. His team leads the REWIRE Innovation and Knowledge Centre, part of the UK’s national effort to push compound semiconductor power electronic technology.

Through new partnerships with Nagoya University in Japan, Kuball is helping to align UK research with one of the world’s most advanced automotive and electronics industries. He believes the UK’s strength lies not in building vast fabrication plants, but in developing high-voltage, high-efficiency devices that can be manufactured in smaller volumes yet deliver greater value in the UK – exactly the kind of innovation a thriving EV infrastructure will depend on.

“Unless the charging infrastructure is better, there’s no point me having an EV,” says Kuball. “We can probably do it better than many international players. We have some ideas on that. Can we build a better infrastructure for charging? Yes. Can we also think about wireless charging? Yes. All these parts will have compound semiconductors in there. An end user doesn’t care whether this is silicon carbide, gallium nitride or gallium oxide. They just want it to work efficiently. And we can do this in the UK.”

Kuball argues that the UK’s advantage lies in developing “high-voltage compound semiconductor technology, two to three kilovolts and beyond,” which he describes as “transformative.” He sees potential for the UK to “manufacture those in smaller quantities, but high value,” combining intellectual property with selective international partnerships. “You can’t compete on price against Chinese manufacturers or even scale. So it’s about developing IP and working with partners in places like Japan or Taiwan, also with Europe.”

“Unless the charging infrastructure is better, there’s no point me having an EV”

Professor Martin Kuball

That international partnership is already taking shape. “We have government investment working with Japan,” Kuball explains. “It’s a six-month contract and sets a platform for stronger strategic engagement between the UK and Japan.”

The partnership centres on Nagoya University, one of Japan’s leading materials and automotive research hubs. “We will run a workshop early next year in Japan, bringing in key stakeholders from the UK, not only academia, but industry and government, together with partners in Japan to find collaboration and commercialisation opportunities.”

The aim, he says, is to align the UK’s expertise in high-voltage device design with Japan’s manufacturing and automotive strengths, creating a bridge between two complementary innovation systems. This approach answers techUK’s call in its 2025 agenda, which urges the UK Semiconductor Centre to “map existing assets, connect fragmented strengths, and act as a catalyst for collaboration across the value chain.”

Kuball sees the same efficiency challenge playing out far beyond transport. In data centres, where AI workloads are driving record energy demand, he warns that “people get excited about AI, but forget you need power to run it.”

His research group is exploring hardware-software co-design approaches that link energy-conscious algorithms to compound semiconductor devices, and even to heat-recycling systems developed through European programmes launched in 2024 under the European Innovation Council. The goal, he says, is to make future computing architectures “energy aware from the ground up,” with the same materials breakthroughs that make EV charging faster, also helping AI run cleaner.

That translation from lab to market is already happening. Kuball co-founded TherMap Solutions in 2019, a company focused on the thermal management of complex electronics used in avionics, nuclear systems and advanced semiconductors. His latest commercial venture, still in its early stages, targets oxide materials for high-voltage power electronics, the kind that could redefine how EVs are charged and how electricity moves across the grid.

“It’s a new material that’s very good for high-voltage electronics, such as grid or EV charging,” he explains. “These chargers traditionally contain a lot of gallium, which isn’t cheap, and there can be supply chain concerns, but we’ve found ways to put the material on different substrates with the amount of gallium dramatically reduced.” The plan, he says, is to start by supplying materials to research labs before moving toward packaged devices for converters and inverters for industry.

“The UK won’t compete on two-nanometre technology with Nvidia or TSMC,” Kuball says, “but it can own the IP that powers energy efficiency.” It’s a philosophy that mirrors the UK’s semiconductor strategy: focus on high-value design, materials, and intellectual property rather than mass production. In that sense, Kuball’s start-ups are microcosms of the industrial model the UK is trying to build – agile, research-driven, and globally connected. From an innovation point of view, that’s definitely one to watch.