Ireland stakes its reputation on Bell

The report on the failed Media Lab Europe project by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Irish government's public spending watchdog, published last month, has focused attention on the success of other industry–academic research partnerships in Ireland, particularly on one involving Bell Labs and the Centre for Telecommunications Value Chain Research, a consortium of eight universities led by Trinity College Dublin.

The Bell Labs initiative, the largest and most high-profile of a series of campus-based research centres created by the country's principal basic research agency, Science Foundation Ireland, bagged €69 million in total funding last year. This included €43 million for the establishment of a Bell Labs research centre in Dublin - which was supported by an undisclosed level of grant aid from the Irish government - and €26 million in research funding over the first five years of the Centre, known as the CTVR.

If the Bell Labs project – an even bigger investment than Media Lab Europe (MLE) – were to fail, it would have grave implications for Ireland's effort to establish a reputation as an internationally competitive R&D location, one of its key industrial development goals (see “The Media Lab debacle”, below). The model on which Science Foundation Ireland based its investment has quickly become the largest and most prestigious research funding instrument in Ireland and one of the principal means by which the country hopes to persuade multinational companies to locate research functions here.

Ireland being a small place, some of the researchers involved in the CTVR had, inevitably, worked with MLE on collaborative projects. But the missions and methods of the two organisations differ sharply. "CTVR builds on talent that already existed within the Irish university system. We are working on a research agenda that has huge industry endorsement, and we have clear plans to commercialise the results in a way that will deliver maximum benefits to Ireland Inc," says CTVR director Donal O'Mahony, who is also an associate professor of computer science at Trinity College Dublin.

MLE, which had secured funding from AOL, BT, Ericsson, Intel and Orange, was more focused on blue skies innovation, with an emphasis on digital media and on the intersections between technology and artistic creativity. It operated a subscription-based model, which provided its sponsors access to its entire research portfolio, and was expected to become self-financing within a short timeframe. This failed to happen, and it appears to have created little of lasting value.

Partnership

The Bell Labs-CTVR partnership operates in a more tightly integrated and directed fashion. Bell Labs Ireland director Lawrence Cowsar is co-director of the CTVR, and spends part of his working week at Trinity College Dublin. CTVR researchers have travelled to the USA to conduct some of their experimental work, and Bell Labs researchers are also working on collaborative projects in the universities. "The last thing we wanted to be was a dislocated outpost of the mothership," says O'Mahony, referring to the famous Murray Hill, New Jersey, Bell Laboratories (see Bell Labs Factfile, right).

The consortium is pursuing five research strands: emerging network architectures; photonics; radio frequency communications; reliability and test in hardware and software; and value chain optimisation, which draws on optimisation science and constraint-based technology to improve complex decision making. Each strand has a director, based at one of the participating institutions, while deputy strand leaders appointed by Bell Labs provide a direct interface with Bell Labs’ base in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Trinity College Dublin is leading the network architectures strand; University College Cork is leading the photonics and value chain optimisation strands; the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, is leading the radio frequency programme; and the University of Limerick is leading the reliability and test effort. Other CTVR participants include University College Dublin, Dublin Institute of Technology and Sligo Institute of Technology.

Depending on the provenance of the inventions arising from the work, IP will either be shared between Bell Labs and the appropriate institution, or will belong to the originating institution.

The outsourcing imperative

Although Bell Labs is, historically, associated with fundamental scientific research, its foray into Ireland represents an opportunity to address some of the issues associated with the migration of its parent organisation, Lucent Technologies, towards a highly outsourced business model. That shift from a vertically integrated manufacturing model to a heavily distributed one has introduced additional complexities to the economics of product design, development, manufacturing and support.

The value chain concept was developed in the 1980s by Harvard economist Michael Porter to offer managers a method of identifying the individual value-adding activities within their businesses and within the extended supply chains in which their organisations operate. A research agenda based on the same concept is focused not solely on the cost or performance of individual products or components, but on the knock-on effects associated with the adoption of a particular innovation within the telecommunications industry's supply chain.

 "We have chosen to focus on understanding those systems and applying our understanding of complex supply chains to the way we design products, the way we manufacture products and the way we use products through their entire life cycle," says Cowsar. The aim is to produce innovations that will give Lucent "a decisive advantage" in the marketplace, in terms of reduced development costs, faster time to market, and increased product configurability and flexibility.

The partners have already identified a number of projects that are ripe for commercialisation. The CTVR is seeking proof-of-concept funding from Enterprise Ireland - the government agency responsible for developing indigenous industry - to take several projects to an advanced prototype stage. “We’re trying to use that funding to bring in some business-focussed people as well,” says O'Mahony.

One of the projects is using a recent Bell Labs innovation, a super-hydrophobic, nanostructured silicon surface called nanograss, to explore the development of a microfluidics-based liquid cooling system for high-performance integrated circuits. Air-based cooling approaches used at present will not be capable of managing the heat dissipation associated with the increased transistor densities, as set out in semiconductor industry roadmaps.

Patent application

Tara Dalton at the Stokes Institute at the University of Limerick is leading a group analysing the air-fluid interface that is established by fluid flowing across the nanograss surface, in order to improve its stability and performance. This work has already yielded a patent application.

"It's a combination of redoing the geometry of the nanograss and redoing the geometry of the channels in order to stabilise the interface," says Dalton. Although the project has immediate industrial application, it has touched on fundamental issues in physics and fluid mechanics. "It has been a non-trivial problem," she says, adding that the depth of the consortium has enabled it to make such rapid progress. Bell Labs personnel have been responsible for numerical simulation and theoretical modelling, while the Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork has performed the required fabrication work.

Dalton’s group is now expanding its collaboration with Bell Labs on several problems associated with thermal management, and there is a regular, two-way exchange of personnel between her lab and Murray Hill. “There's no way we could have done this with any other research group,” she says. “It still has that wonderful legacy of fundamental research.”