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Duncan McLaren, a first-class honours graduate from Heriot-Watt University, is being sponsored by chip-design giant Cadence to join a unique engineering doctorate programme at the Institute for System Level Integration.

The ISLI, a collaboration between Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde universities, is a key component in the Project Alba initiative that attracted Cadence to Scotland. Project Alba aims to capitalise on higher education expertise to promote a Silicon Glen.

The engineering doctorate is designed for high-calibre graduates who want to pursue a higher qualification through study and research that has a strong industrial focus, rather than the more academic route of a conventional PhD.

The programme, backed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, was created to improve links between research degrees and industry, and to prepare graduates to move from higher education to the commercial world.

Mr McLaren, who graduated in computing and electronics, will spend 18 months of the four-year sponsorship period at the Cadence site researching home networking.