If you want to meet a piece of Welsh tech, just pick up the phone. No, literally. The facial recognition system on your smartphone uses a remarkable bit of atomic engineering that has been pioneered in Wales.  

How often do you get pinged in the face by a Welsh infra-red laser beam? That’s exactly what’s happening to a billion people around the world, a dozen times a day, every single time they pick up their smartphone.

"Your phone has roughly 100,000 times the computing power of the Apollo computer that landed man on the moon. We have the silicon chip to thank for this remarkable leap. But silicon has its limitations - and that’s where compound semiconductors come in. ‘Compound’ means that instead of using just a single material like silicon, you add layers of other semiconducting materials – things like gallium, arsenic, aluminium, indium and phosphorous. You build a wafer of different layers that might be just a few atoms thick. Your chip can now do much more. It can operate at higher speeds, generate microwave signals, work at much higher (and lower) voltages. It can emit and detect light, sense magnetism, and cope with radiation - which is very handy in space.

CSs have revolutionised the way that data is generated, transmitted and stored. They’re inside the next generation of telecom networks that’ll keep us all digitally connected, allowing billions of connected devices to talk to each other in ways we take utterly for granted. They’ll allow future tech to become just as commonplace. Autonomous cars are a great example: all those sensors that detect pedestrians and other cars, the processors that make crucial decisions in real time, the telemetrics that beam information between your car and solar-powered satellites – they all depend on CS tech."

Dr Wyn Meredith,  Director of the Compound Semiconductor Centre, a joint venture between IQE Plc and Cardiff University 

There is a whole ecosystem in Wales.

The world will soon have a trillion connected devices. Deep inside them, at an atomic level, they’ll all be whispering to each other… in Welsh.