CSIRO patent windfall as Aussie inventiveness honoured

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 14 October 2009 12:02

IT Industry - Market

Today, at a special ceremony, the CSIRO honoured the inventiveness of the team that developed the technology, which lies at the heart of how millions of people now use wireless networks to access information on a myriad of portable devices. One of the main problems the team managed to solve was ’multipathing’.

At the ceremony in Melbourne, the scientific, commercial and legal teams responsible for the achievement received the CSIRO’s highest honour, the Chairman’s Medal for Research Achievement.

Dr Stocker said the CSIRO’s solution to the ‘multipath problem’, and its subsequent commercialisation ranks as “one of the most significant achievements in CSIRO’s 82 year history.”

“You might imagine that the little box with the flashing lights that powers your home wireless network is simply beaming information straight to your laptop,” Dr John O’Sullivan, leader of the scientific team, said today.

“In reality the radio waves travel in all directions, bouncing off walls, furniture and people – making it very hard to deliver a clear signal to the receiver.”

Dr O’Sullivan said the team solved this problem by adapting ideas that had their roots in radioastronomy and the search for exploding black holes.

“I was inspired to think about ways of cleaning up smeared radio signals to make searching for short pulses like those from exploding black holes easier.

“We ended up building a ‘fast Fourier transform’ chip to do these sorts of processing tasks efficiently and fast. That proved to be the key to untangling the web of wireless signals so we could build a workable high speed wireless local area network (WLAN).”