By Steve Rogerson

Sir Clive Sinclair plans to continue as an electronics industry leader, despite Amstrad's £5 million takeover of his ailing computer business.

Sir Clive's aims are ambitious - wafer scale integration, a cheap cellular telephone and a large supercomputer. But he intends to develop two early ideas which have caused him more problems than success - electric vehicles and small tvs. The Amstrad deal has cleared his debts, esimated at £10m, and a number of backers, most of them unnamed, have stepped in to finance these future projects.

Barclays Bank is backing the wafer scale integration research based on an original patent from Ivor Catt. Sir Clive said the first product, a 5in 40Mbit wafer, would be launched next year. He admits his supercomputer is a few years away but he is talking about 1 billion floating point operations per second and more. This may be based on the Inmos transputer - sources say he has had lengthy discussions with Inmos.

But the next product from Sinclair Research will probably be a low price cellular telephone for the mass consumer market. The telephone is being developed at his Winchester subsidiary and Sir Clive will soon announce the name of the financial backer for this project.

Sinclair Research will also act as an industry think tank, doing contract research for other companies. Sir Clive said a number of firms were interested but he refused to name them.

On electric vehicles he said: "We have got designs for a full range of electric vehicles. We are negotiating for people to come in with us on that."

Meanwhile, Sinclair brand name computers will be sold by Amstrad. The firm ironically also plans to use the Sinclair name on a new range of calculators. Calculators were one of the first products for which Sinclair became well known.

Amstrad will also have first refusal on Sinclair's Pandora lap top computer which is being developed by Sinclair.

One product Amstrad is not interested in is the QL. Alan Sugar, millionaire founder and chairman of Amstrad, said "We will be destocking the QL. There is no future for it."

He said QL production had already stopped, but added he would be prepared to sell the technology if somebody was interested. He also said he may develop a computer based on the QL but with a disk drive, not a microdrive.

As part of the takeover deal, Sugar bought existing stocks of Sinclair computers, plus work in progress with Timex, AB Electronics and Thorn EMI. He refused to say how much he had paid for this.

Although he intends to continue the contracts with these companies for the time being, some production may be transferred overseas. Amstrad already makes some of its products in South Korea.

"The problem is," said Sugar, "that most of the parts come from Japan. There is an 18% import duty on microchips. If you make it outside the EEC, the duty on the finished product is only 4.9%"

He said he was trying to get the import rules changed and admitted that he could already get some chips without paying duty if he could prove that they are not available elsewhere.

Sugar also plans to tackle the poor quality reported on some software products for Sinclair computers by setting up a quality control body to check products. These would then carry a stamp saying they had been passed.

Sugar also plans to tackle the Japanese market. He said that cheap home computers were just taking off in Japan.