Extra funding secured to keep researchers in Australia

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.

Senator Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and Deputy Leader of the Government of the Senate, announced that the Australian government would provide the extra funding to NICTA to enable the organisation to hire researchers with world-class skills in silicon chip design.

Sixteen researchers were recently made redundant from LSI Australia following the closure of its North Ryde research facility.

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 multimedia 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.