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.
Senator the Hon Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and Deputy Leader of the Government of the Senate announced today that the Australian Government would provide extra funding to NICTA to enable the organisation to hire researchers with world-class skills in silicon chip design.
The 16 researchers were recently made redundant from LSI Australia (formerly Agere Systems) following the closure of their North Ryde research facility.
“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.
The extra funding from the Australian Government means NICTA will be able to offer new employment to these researchers.
They will be working on wireless-related research within NICTA’s Embedded Systems research theme. This research is developing next generation wireless networks.
“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.
The researchers will be based at NICTA’s New South Wales facilities and will be an important part of NICTA’s efforts in Embedded Systems.
NICTA’s Gigabit Wireless research Project is collaborating with IBM T.J. Watson, Princeton University, and Georgia Institute of Technology.
The Project has also received significant industry support including from Cadence, Synopsys, Agilent, Anritsu and Suss Micro Systems.
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.
For more information contact:
Kelly Mills
E- kelly.mills@nicta.com.au
W- www.nicta.com.au