Government doles out $5 million to keep laid off chip researchers in Australia

Stan Beer
Monday, 29 October 2007 12:52

Your IT - Home IT

A few weeks out from the federal election, 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. According to NICTA, the additional funds will enable retention of a team of world-class chip design researchers in Australia.

Senator Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts 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 who were previously made redundant.

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, which involves development of 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.

NICTA believes the addition of the researchers to the Millimetre Wave Gigabit Wireless Project team will allow the organisation 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.

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.