Adding value to South Wales’ best kept secret

Adding value to South Wales’ best kept secret

Stride Treglown is embedded in the very heart of South Wales’ economic powerhouse.

We contribute not just by designing the high-value, advanced and human-centred buildings that keep the region’s private and public sectors at the cutting edge, but also by helping to guide its overall strategic direction.

Key enablers

In particular, we are closely associated with South Wales’ best kept secret: CS Connected, their Compound Semiconductor cluster.

This matters because compound semiconductors are a so-called ‘key enabling technology’, critical to our digital future and national economic success.

Used in everything from 5G, high-speed data communications and the Internet of Things to aerospace, face recognition and healthcare imaging, analysts estimate that the global market will grow from $66 bn today to $308 bn by 2030.

We are shoulder to the wheel making sure that South Wales’ semiconductor dominance grows.

Focused on Cardiff but extending along the M4 corridor to Swansea in the west and Newport in the east, the CS Connected cluster comprises a number of world-class educational, academic, R&D and manufacturing facilities, including the Compound Semiconductor Centre and the Institute for Compound Semiconductor Technology.

Together they exert a huge gravitational pull, attracting the best students, researchers and companies to the area: an irresistible combination for inward investment.

We’re helping to grow and improve the cluster, deploying our expertise in educational, workplace and specialist technology environments to great effect.

For example, we’re designing the £25 m Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials at Swansea University, which includes state-of-the-art facilities for early-stage scientific research.

We’re ensuring the ongoing supply of next-gen STEM talent in many other ways.

In Cardiff, we’re designing the Computational Science and Mathematics Building for Cardiff University (main image), which is just about to go on site. We’ve been working on a new Engineering Building for the University of South Wales in Pontypridd, and are deeply involved with the School Of Engineering at Swansea University, designing four major buildings at their new Bay Campus.

Connecting pathways

Further east along the M4, we designed, in related fields, the world-class, £31m National Composites Centre (NCC) and the £70m Institute for Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems (IAAPS), (below) an ultra-low and zero emissions automotive engineering R&I hub, both outside of Bristol.

Our skill is to find the sustainable, added-value sweet spot between the stringency required of state-of-the-art laboratory design on the one hand and effective, human-centred workplaces on the other.

As traditional boundaries between scientific disciplines converge in the quest for innovation, it is increasingly important to set the scene for attracting and retaining the best students, staff, and outside collaborators, and helping them to cross-fertilise ideas productively.

The NCC, for example, is a high-value manufacturing catapult hosting an amalgam of tier-one contractors, supply chain suppliers, and academics. As well as advanced, high containment level facilities, it features a landscape of comfortable, attractive common spaces to accommodate social encounters and a variety of styles of transdisciplinary working.

As pioneers in designing for the semiconductor industry and many other scientific sectors including automotive engineering, health and life sciences, composites and data science, we will be pressing the case for inward investment to South Wales and beyond.

We are keen to listen, learn, and share our rich expertise – if that sounds tempting, please get in touch.

 

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