CW Technology & Engineering Conference 2026

Following its landmark 10th anniversary in 2025, the CW Technology and Engineering Conference (CWTEC) continues as a key fixture in the UK tech calendar. Each year, the conference brings together 250+ senior engineers, technologists, academics, and business leaders to tackle the most pressing technology challenges shaping our economic future.

In July 2026, CWTEC turns its focus to the semiconductor and photonics technologies shaping the next decade of connectivity and compute.

As the semiconductor industry accelerates into an era defined by AI, electrification, and advanced connectivity, the engineering challenges are becoming more complex than ever. Miniaturisation is no longer the sole driver of technological advances. Speed, heat, bandwidth, and, most importantly, energy efficiency, are driving us to think and innovate differently.

CWTEC 2026 will explore how the UK's semiconductor and photonics landscape is evolving to meet these challenges. At the conference, we will take a deeper technical look at the semiconductor and photonics technologies that are shaping today's AI boom, and we will look to the future, to the technologies that will shape the next decade.

• Where are we now, in design, manufacturing, materials and systems integration?
• And what must evolve to meet future demands in connectivity, energy efficiency, quantum, sensing and high-performance compute?
• What new bottlenecks are emerging?
• And critically, where can the UK carve out distinctive global leadership?

The UK is internationally recognised in semiconductors and photonics and has strategically important strengths. As traditional scaling slows and system-level innovation becomes the differentiator, the UK's capabilities matter more than ever.

How do we capitalise on this unique opportunity? And where should the UK take a lead?

Bringing together engineers, technologists, and industry leaders, the event will provide technically rigorous insight, forward-looking debate, and practical perspectives on what comes next.

If you're working at the frontier of semiconductor and photonics innovation in the UK, this is where the next chapter gets shaped.

This year's agenda will focus on four areas: 

• UK Strengths, Capabilities & Gaps
  As the semiconductor industry looks to move beyond the current AI wave, this session assesses the UK’s current position in the globally competitive semiconductor ecosystem: our strengths, our gaps, and the opportunities that lie ahead. With a focus on what comes next - from photonics and power electronics to heterogenous integration - we will explore how the UK can shape and lead in the next frontier of technology.
• Power Electronics, Photonics and Quantum - Does the Past Dictate the Future?
  Are the performance gains still sufficient to justify further investment? With R&D taking place across a range of semiconductor materials, how will material choices be made, and which are ultimately likely to succeed in the market? This could span CS, 2D materials and rare earth metals for semiconductors, devices, interposers, substrates, gratings and heatsinks. How will this expertise help accelerate and support quantum solutions?
• Design & Future Compute Architectures
  AI is dominating the headlines, but innovation in compute architectures is happening across the board.  AI itself is becoming multiple market opportunities, increasingly distinct from each other: optimal solutions for data center-scale training are no longer perfectly-suited for DC-scale inference, nor for delivering AI inference at the edge, whether that edge is at the edge of the cloud or embedded in an endpoint.  Beyond AI, CPU innovation in the data centre is back in focus, as are optical compute architectures offering ultra-low latency for both general-purpose and AI compute.  And commercial-grade quantum computing remains tantalisingly just around the corner.  The UK has substantial capabilities in this whole area, with a long track record of successful innovation and commercial exploitation.  We also have major strengths in semiconductor device design, particularly in VLSI CMOS, with well with over 200 design teams active around the country.  How can we play to all these capabilities in a new era dominated by a handful of large-scale vendors and customers?
• Sovereign Supply Chains
  Export controls, trade barriers, geopolitical tensions and competition for critical materials are changing where and how semiconductor and photonic supply chains work. The UK has world class capabilities in chip design, compound semiconductors and photonics, but where are the real bottlenecks in delivering on those strengths at scale, particularly for critical applications like AI, data centres and high performance compute? Does the UK have the domestic capacity to match its ambitions, or does it need the right partnerships to bridge the gap?

Take a look back at previous CWTECs below.