The microprocessor is one of the most significant scientific inventions of the 20th century, with over 10 billion processors sold in 2011, and forecasts predict over 40 billion processors will be sold by 2020. The global market is worth over 20 billion euro with annual growth rates of 14%. Microprocessors and computing systems have tremendous positive impact on everyday life, from the internet to consumer electronics, transportation, healthcare and manufacturing. In the future, embedded computing systems - many of which will be low-power mobile devices - will be amongst the most powerful tools for tackling global economic and societal challenges. Continuing advances in microprocessor and embedded system design are the key to achieving this. Computing systems, however, are facing a once-in-a-generation technical challenge: the relentless increase in processor speed to improve performance of the past 50 years has come to an end. As a result, computing systems are being forced to switch from a focus on performance-centric serial computation to energy-efficient parallel computation. This switch is driven by the higher energy-efficiency of using many slower parallel processor cores instead of a single high-speed one. This switch has attracted worldwide attention and the term "multi-core", and subsequently "many-core" came into widespread use to generally describe the vision of computing systems with 100s of processor cores. Today this is one of the most dynamic areas of computer science and electronics because of its huge potential commercial and academic impact. We already see processors with many-cores in high performance and cloud computing, examples are the Cisco 188-core Metro, Intel 80-core Terascale, and IBM 64-core Cyclops chips. While mobile and embedded devices are starting to emerge with dual- and quad-cores, such as the ARM Cortex-A7, these are only embryonic examples and we are yet to see the future of high performance mobile and embedded systems featuring many-core processors. The ability of these systems to compute, communicate, and respond to the real-world will transform how we work, do business, shop, travel, and care for ourselves, ultimately transforming our daily lives and shaping the emergence of a new digital society for the 21st century. We envisage the tremendous prospect of entirely new forms of high-performance embedded systems to complement, enhance and in some cases supersede existing systems in a wide range of applications such as telecommunications, consumer electronics, transport and medical systems, where energy and reliability are central. Many-core technology has been viewed as a way to improve performance at the processor level, but its profound implications on the energy efficiency and reliability of future embedded systems with 100s or 1000s of cores has not been studied in depth. Our vision is to enable the sustainability of many-core scaling by preventing the uncontrolled increase in energy consumption and unreliability through a step change in holistic design methods and cross-layer system optimisation. Delivering this science is the core research objective of PRiME. In more detail, it seeks to establish the new science and engineering that is needed to design future high-performance, energy-efficient and reliable embedded systems with many-core processors. To this end, it brings together four groups with world-leading expertise in the complementary areas of low-power, highly-parallel, reconfigurable and dependable computing and verified software design. Four internationally renowned experts will also contribute to PRiME as Visiting Researchers: J. Henkel, Karlsruhe Uni., embedded systems, V. Betz, Uni. Toronto, FPGA/CAD, M. Kaaniche, LASS-CNRS, dependability, and T. Roscoe, ETH-Zurich, operating systems.

The Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing, a collaboration between 7 universities, NPL, BGS and industry, will bring disruptive new capability to real world applications with high economic and societal impact to the UK. The unique properties of QT sensors will enable radical innovations in Geophysics, Health Care, Timing Applications and Navigation. Our established industry partnerships bring a focus to our research work that enable sensors to be customised to the needs of each application. The total long term economic impact could amount to ~10% of GDP. Gravity sensors can see beneath the surface of the ground to identify buried structures that result in enormous cost to construction projects ranging from rail infrastructure, or sink holes, to brownfield site developments. Similarly they can identify oil resources and magma flows. To be of practical value, gravity sensors must be able to make rapid measurements in challenging environments. Operation from airborne platforms, such as drones, will greatly reduce the cost of deployment and bring inaccessible locations within reach. Mapping brain activity in patients with dementia or schizophrenia, particularly when they are able to move around and perform tasks which stimulate brain function, will help early diagnosis and speed the development of new treatments. Existing brain imaging systems are large and unwieldy; it is particularly difficult to use them with children where a better understanding of epilepsy or brain injury would be of enormous benefit. The systems we will develop will be used initially for patients moving freely in shielded rooms but will eventually be capable of operation in less specialised environments. A new generation of QT based magnetometers, manufactured in the UK, will enable these advances. Precision timing is essential to many systems that we take for granted, including communications and radar. Ultra-precise oscillators, in a field deployable package, will enable radar systems to identify small slow-moving targets such as drones which are currently difficult to detect, bringing greater safety to airports and other sensitive locations. Our world is highly dependent on precise navigation. Although originally developed for defence, our civil infrastructure is critically reliant on GNSS. The ability to fix one's location underground, underwater, inside buildings or when satellite signals are deliberately disrupted can be greatly enhanced using QT sensing. Making Inertial Navigation Systems more robust and using novel techniques such as gravity map matching will alleviate many of these problems. In order to achieve all this, we will drive advanced physics research aimed at small, low power operation and translate it into engineered packages to bring systems of unparalleled capability within the reach of practical applications. Applied research will bring out their ability to deliver huge societal and economic benefit. By continuing to work with a cohort of industry partners, we will help establish a complete ecosystem for QT exploitation, with global reach but firmly rooted in the UK. These goals can only be met by combining the expertise of scientists and engineers across a broad spectrum of capability. The ability to engineer devices that can be deployed in challenging environments requires contributions from physics electronic engineering and materials science. The design of systems that possess the necessary characteristics for specific applications requires understanding from civil and electronic engineering, neuroscience and a wide range of stakeholders in the supply chain. The outputs from a sensor is of little value without the ability to translate raw data into actionable information: data analysis and AI skills are needed here. The research activities of the hub are designed to connect and develop these skills in a coordinated fashion such that the impact on our economy is accelerated.