Wireless Research Gets Boost

Written by Adam Gosling

Tuesday, 30 October 2007

NICTA's Gigabit wireless research project has had a big boost thanks to the addition of 16 researchers rescued from redundancy with a GOvernment grant. The 16 researchers faced unemployment after they were recently made redundant from LSI Australia (formerly Agere Systems) following the closure of its North Ryde research facility. But in an effort to keep these highly skilled wireless researchers onshore, the Australian Government has contributed an extra $4.8 million over two years to NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence, which will enable retention of a team of world-class researchers in Australia. The extra funding from means NICTA will be able to bring the researchers onto a project within NICTA's Embedded Systems research theme. Based at at NICTA's New South Wales facilities the researchers will collaborate on the Gigabit Wireless research Project with IBM T.J. Watson, Princeton University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. The funding from Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts does not include infrastructure costs to support the team. Remaining costs will be absorbed by NICTA. The Project has also received significant industry support including from Cadence, Synopsys, Agilent, Anritsu and Suss Micro Systems. "Through this team Australia has developed a core competency in silicon chip design which is leading edge and contributed to Australia's ICT capability," NICTA Acting Chief Executive Officer Professor Aruna Seneviratne said. "NICTA identified an opportunity to merge the LSI Australia-Agere team with an existing research effort to create state-of-the-art personal broadband wireless chips which will enable people to transfer large multi-media files, such as entire movies, a thousand times faster than currently possible," NICTA Chief Technology Officer of Embedded Systems Dr Chris Nicol said. The addition of the researchers to the Millimetre Wave Gigabit Wireless Project team will allow NICTA to fast-track research on the technology. NICTA envisages that the increased effort afforded by the LSI team could mean that research from the project would be ready for commercialisation in two years. Newer news items Nokia Morphs Handset Design -26/02/2008 Kodak Promises Decent Phone Cameras -04/02/2008 Intel Was "Disingenuous": OLPC Chief -07/01/2008 World's First In-Flight Mobile Access -01/01/2008 Google Brings 34 Vendors To Phone Consortium -06/11/2007 Older news items Is Nokia Planning Its Own iPhone? -03/07/2007 AirAsia To Offer In-Flight Mobile Coverage By Early 2009 -26/06/2007 Unreleased iPhone Beats The Competition -28/05/2007 Ashamed? Intel? I doubt it -23/05/2007 Puma Promises Lower Power Better Graphics -23/05/2007 Tag This Now: