United Kingdom: Innovation in Time Dissemination and Application of Resilient TFS

Deadline: 9-Jun-21

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is working with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to invest up to £2 million in feasibility studies for innovation in the dissemination and application of resilient time, frequency and synchronisation (TFS).

The key areas for development are:

distribution
trust, assurance and security
resilience

The aim of this competition is to:

support and enable business-led innovation across the UK supply chain in resilient TFS for the development of products, services and end user applications
develop a TFS ecosystem and capability for relevant industries and critical national infrastructure
disrupt and create new markets to improve the provision of TFS

Your proposal must deliver a feasibility study for an innovative development and demonstrate a route to market.

Themes

Your project must focus on one or more of the following themes:

Distribution: Your project must enable end users to have access to improved time or frequency signals.
- You must include one or more of the following:
  - dissemination to multiple users
  - scalability
  - accessibility (geography)
  - ubiquity and availability, including rural and GNSS denied locations
- For example, developments could include scalability to users at the edge of networks or to those currently without access.
Trust, assurance and security: Your project must contribute to the trust, assurance and security of time or frequency signals from the source to the end user (or a defined subset of this path).
- You must include one or more of the following:
  - integrity
  - accuracy (absolute time value at the end user compared to the traceable source)
  - confidence in end-to-end transmission
  - validation
- This could, for example, relate to audit and certification of time signals at various levels of accuracy or signal integrity when transferring time signals over distances and mediums. Algorithms and protocols, especially those that increase the integrity of timing signals, are also in scope.
Resilience: Your project must contribute to the resilience of the time dissemination supply chain in one or more of the following:
- availability (continuity of signal)
- redundancy and holdover
- alerting and monitoring

Funding Information

Project size: Your project’s total eligible costs must be between £50,000 and £250,000.
Projects can start from 1 October 2021.

Funding Priority

Projects must be focused on one or more of these development areas relating to the dissemination of TFS:
- products
- services
- protocols and algorithms
- standards
They are looking for your projects to be scalable, geographically or across applications.
Your project should lead to the following types of impact for the UK:
- economic, including new revenue, cost savings, other economic impacts
- national capability in TFS.

Eligibility Criteria

Your project must:
- have total eligible costs between £50,000 and £250,000
- end by 31 May 2022
- last between 4 and 6 months
Lead organisation
- To lead a project or work alone your organisation must:
  - be a UK registered business of any size
  - if collaborative, partner with other UK registered businesses, research organisations, research and technology organisations (RTO), academic institutions, public sector organisations or charities
  - carry out its project work in the UK
  - intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
- Academic institutions and research organisations cannot lead or work alone.
Project team
- To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must:
  - be a UK registered business, research organisation, research and technology organisation (RTO), academic institution, public sector organisation or charity
  - carry out its project work in the UK
  - intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
- If collaborating, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application.
- Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to log in or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.
- Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example, non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total eligible project costs.