About Us

ISLI sits at the critical interface between the academic and commercial engineering worlds

System Level Integration Limited operates the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) on behalf of four universities and the Scottish Enterprise regional development agency. The role of the institute is to act as a technology transfer bridge between the knowledge base and industry. We work closely with our partner universities to ensure we maintain a current engagement at the leading edge of knowledge, but use this to deliver real world benefits, regardless of whether the problem or solution are of a research level. Our focus is on the benefit and outcome in the marketplace.

Established for over a decade (1998), The Institute is focused on knowledge transfer in enabling technologies, our vision being to increase the value and extent of company engagements in high level R&D. We strive directly to bridge the research exploitation gap, encompassing Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) 3 to 6, by engaging both industry and academia individually and in common projects. The enabling technology, on which we focus, is applied across a very wide range of end applications,meaning our skills and technology are applied across a diverse range of client application areas.

As well as supporting transfer of truly new and emerging technology, we also work with more mature technology where the technical risk and immaturity is in applying this to new applications or markets.In this activity, our underlying approach is predicated on the belief that today’s adopters of ‘mundanetechnology’ will become the research-engaged companies of tomorrow.

Technology Areas
We cover the areas of electronic systems and Si MEMS / MST. Electronics systems includes specific capability to develop board level systems incorporating embedded processing and software, low power, sensors, wireless communications, FPGA, image and signal processing.

Our Si MEMS / MST expertise isdirected particularly toward novel sensor development with the capability to integrate CMOS circuitry.Through the combination of skills we address interfacing between MEMS and the wider system.

Activity Streams
Our primary role is the distillation of the advancing state of knowledge to support a much wideraudience, typically product based SMEs, to deliver business benefits from advancing skills and technology. In this case the technology itself may be at TRL 7 or higher, and the technical challenge is inthe development of this technology to address new market opportunities which may have quite distinct detailed technical or regulatory requirements.

Our second thread is to deliver the application of high level research outcomes to new and oftendisruptive areas of exploitation, usually with larger and more established companies and in partnership with the research base. This is very much a tertiary level activity requiring staff with a mix of high levelacademic capability and significant real world commercial experience. These activities will typically becharacterised by the application of technology which is itself in the region of TRL 3-6.

Our third activity is in the provision and management of tertiary level technical education. We perform this in-house with our academic partners providing lecture material and ISLI bringing commercialinteraction, particularly through project definition and support. We also have a portfolio of distance and on-line learning using our own staff and in-house delivery resources. We have established offerings intertiary level education as well as in continuing professional development in other fields.