News

12 January 2010

 

IMEC joins initiative to cut network energy consumption 1000-fold by 2015

International research center IMEC of Leuven, Belgium is to take part in the Green Touch Initiative, a new consortium of industry players, research institutions and non-governmental organizations initiated by Alcatel-Lucent’s research arm Bell Labs that aims to invent technologies that will be at the heart of the next generation of sustainable networks. The consortium aims to define the challenge and identify and develop solutions with the goal of delivering the architecture, specifications, roadmap, and demonstrations of key components needed to reduce ICT energy consumption per user for the Internet and other communication networks (e.g. corporate networks) by a factor of 1000 within five years.

To achieve its target of setting a reference architecture and demonstrating key components of the next generation of sustainable ICT networks, the consortium intends to leverage the expertise of leading industrial research groups, academia, and service providers, and will collaborate in pioneering new technologies and fundamentally redesigning existing ICT networks.

IMEC intends to bring its wireless communication expertise to the consortium, as its green radio R&D program focuses on low-power and low-cost radio technology solutions. The research centre has a track record on low-power reconfigurable radio technologies, power optimization through embedded intelligence and environment-aware cognitive solutions, millimeter-wave high-throughput wireless communication for Gigabit communication at short distances, and ultra-low-power wireless communications in the context of personal sensor networks. Moreover, in the framework of its recently launched INSITE program, IMEC studies the impact of new process technologies on circuits, addressing industry’s increasing need for more application-specific technology solutions to reach the targets set by the Green Touch Initiative.

“By joining the Green Touch Initiative, IMEC teams up with industrial and academic leaders in ICT R&D to solve one of the grand challenges our world faces: to provide sustainable yet ubiquitous connectivity for everyone and everything at an energy consumption which approaches the theoretical limits,” says CEO Luc Van den hove.

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Visit: www.greentouch.org

Visit: www2.imec.be