it@cork

UCC's Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C) and the National Microelectronics Research Centre's (NMRC) Photonics Research Group will receive up to 7 million euro in funding as part of the recently announced research initiative to establish the 26 million Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain-Driven Research (CTVR).

The CTVR is part of a major 69 million investment package in telecommunications and supply chain technologies sector agreed by Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, IDA Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland. The investment also includes the establishment of a Bell Laboratories centre in Ireland and it is anticipated that researchers from both of the new centres will work together to create a significant international cluster of academic and industrial research activities.

The CTVR, which will be headquartered in TCD, brings together a unique combination of talents and disciplines from eight academic institutions in Ireland in association with Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories, all of whom have the common aim of developing affordable, state-of-the-art telecommunications networks of the future.

The research to be undertaken in CTVR will focus on advancements in product engineering, manufacturing and value/supply chain techniques, tools and technologies. The expertise and know-how developed in the centre will facilitate, stimulate and encourage design and innovation and allow for new products to be brought to the market more quickly and more efficiently. That expertise and know-how will be directly applicable to both multinational and indigenous companies engaged in the design, manufacture and operation of highly refined electronics products, including in the next generation of fixed and wireless communications networks.

UCC's contribution to the CTVR is built around the extensive photonics expertise present in UCC and the computer science expertise of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C) in UCC.

UCC will lead the photonics strand and will direct research in the areas of tunable sources, reconfigurable hardware platforms, integrated thermal management and self-test performance monitoring. The technical vision for this strand is to develop components and platforms that offer greater flexibility to optical network designers. This vision places enormous demands for innovation of next generation configurable components & their integration. Because the CTVR vision as a whole is to study the logistics of emerging value chain driven research, the research within the photonics strand will be directed with this thinking in mind. At present, hardware configurations in photonics at the physical layer of the network do not meet these challenges and are inflexible and not easily adaptable/scalable to this need.

4C is a world leader in optimisation technology with particularly relevant experience for the CTVR in the area of value chain optimisation and associated issues of planning, scheduling, configuration and design. The Director of 4C, Professor Gene Freuder, who will lead these research activities, has had prior support from the telecommunications industry, including from Lucent, British Telecommunications, and Nokia. The CTVR will facilitate the application and exploitation of the work of 4C, and provide 4C with important problems to motivate and validate its scientific advances. 4C was initially established through SFI support of Professor Freuder as an SFI Fellow. It is anticipated that the collaborations established through the CTVR will further capitalise on SFI's initial investment in this research area.

A key strength of the CTVR lies in the development of collaborative links with new Bell Laboratories research centre in Ireland and its parent company Lucent Technologies. It is anticipated that the NMRC and 4C research teams will work closely with researchers in both organisations creating synergies that will greatly enhance the impact of the CTVR research results. Such links are very welcome as they enrich the research environment of NMRC and 4C as well as the wider IT community at UCC.

UCC believes that the CTVR will directly enhance and strengthen the status of all of the participants in the area of telecommunications and value chain research. It will also underpin national strategies in the general areas of Science, Technology and Education and will, in particular, help to underpin Ireland as an important future contributor to ICT research activities.