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Intel puts mobility at heart of revamped R&D organization

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 19 June, 2009

READ MORE: Intel

It seems to be the week for giant companies to outline their efforts in mobile R&D. Hard on the heels of IBM's $100m program focused on mobility in enterprises and emerging markets, Intel has revamped its own extensive R&D activities, creating a restructured organization called Intel Labs, in which mobile internet devices will play a key role.

The chip giant's R&D was previously housed in the Corporate Technology Group. The primary new focus areas for the Labs group will be mobility, visual computing, system-on-chip design, enterprise, power efficiency and 'eco-innovation', and the company has also created a new sub-group geared to energy systems such as smart grids and smart homes. All this will come within five units. Two are existing activities, microprocessing/programming and circuits and systems. Two are new - integrated platforms and future technologies - and Intel China Labs has been promoted to be a standalone unit within the broader Labs activity. All the units report to CTO Justin Rattner, also an Intel senior fellow and director of Intel Labs, which employs 1,000 researchers in 10 locations.

Like IBM's new programs, most of the projects are not bluesky, but geared to near term or midterm commercialization. "A result that doesn't find its way into a product doesn't have much value," said Rattner at an open day for Intel Labs yesterday, though he insisted: "We actually welcome failure in the labs. If we don't have enough failures, something is wrong; we're not taking enough risk and chasing the larger goals."

As ExtremeTech.com reports, the next generation of the Atom processor family, Moorestown, was highlighted at the open day, touting a future in MIDs and smartphones, and a 50fold improvement in idle power compared to the current Menlow generation.

Intel is also looking forward to the day when mobile processors are integrated in a far wider range of devices, requiring ultra-low power and footprint. For instance, Intel has a project with the University of California at Berkeley, called 'Think Link', which focuses on extreme interactivity and 'confrontational computing' (arguing on the internet, apparently). It also showed off progress reports in areas such as wireless power, and the use of MEMS sensors (in this demonstration, for mapping air quality).

Also in the wireless world, the Sly-Fi project is close to commercial reality, and Intel hopes to make it part of the 802.11 standards family. Sly-Fi would encrypt all the bits sent out by a Wi-Fi card, including the headers, to improve security against hackers. Intel researcher Ozgur Oyman also demonstrated an ad hoc Wi-Fi network that could be used to supplement a WiMAX or 3G connection at the edge of a cell.