UK Technology and
Innovation Business News #23 Jan 2013
Manufacturing News
The high tech industry is facing two divergent challenges
when it comes to product lifecycle. Consumer products are being upgraded and
replaced faster than ever before. At the same time, high-end, high-value
equipment is increasingly being designed for—and used—for the long-haul. These
dynamics put the high-tech supply chain in a unique position to provide an
additional level of service and support to the electronics ecosystem.
GRAPHENE George Osborne has pledged more funding to
help British universities conduct graphene research. The British government is
to provide further funding for research into the wonder-material that is known
as graphene. It has been reported that the Chancellor George Osborne will
invest an extra £21.5 million in funding to some of the leading universities in
the UK, in order to develop commercial uses for graphene.
Funding Breakdown The extra funding will however be
combined with the government’s previous funding investment of £50m into the
technology back in October 2011. It seems that the new funding will be made up
of £12m from that 2011 funding, coupled with £10m from the science research
council EPSRC. The new total of £21.5m will be allocated to specific
universities in the UK. And it has been reported that these universities,
alongside their industrial partners, will also commit £14m. Most of the £21.5m
funding will go to Cambridge University, which was awarded £12m for research
into graphene flexible electronics and opto-electronics (think touchscreens and
electronics). London’s Imperial College meanwhile will receive over £4.5
million to investigate the possible aerospace applications of graphene. Funding
will also go to projects at Durham University, the University of Manchester,
the University of Exeter and Royal Holloway. All of these universities will be
working with their respective industrial partners including Airbus, Nokia, BAE
Systems, Procter & Gamble, Qinetiq, Rolls-Royce, Dyson, Sharp and Philips
Research.
Wonder-Material With its superior performance, high
tensile strength and lightweight characteristics, carbon fibre has proven to be
a popular material for use in manufactured goods.
The utilisation of carbon fibre by car companies such as McLaren
and aircraft manufacturers Airbus and Boeing have improved improve production
methods but carbon fibre is not without its problems. The material remains
relatively expensive and time consuming to produce, it is difficult to recycle
and it is neither biodegradable nor photo-degradable, so effective disposal is
notoriously difficult. To help solve some of the issues associated with carbon
fibre, aircraft manufacturer Boeing has partnered with carmaker BMW to research
automating the production of ultra-light carbon fibre and how best to recycle
the material. The graphene funding comes after a host of big names backed a
petition to get the government to spend the £4 billion it gets from the
Ofcom-run 4G auction at the end of the year on science and technology. The
government has previously faced criticism for its lack of tech funding in these
austere times.
Cambridge is to step into the heart of the increasingly
heated battle for graphene dominance by launching a £24m multi-million pound
development centre that will use an open innovation model to take the material
beyond early research to a position where products, jobs and an industry can be
created.
Smart
Infrastructure News
In 2012, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Automated
Driving and connected vehicles dominated the headlines in the automotive
electronics industry. Nevertheless, the engineers - you, our readers -
preferred more in-depth information to seemingly unimposing topics: Batteries,
electric drivetrains etc ...
In 2012 there was estimated to be 308,000 patients remotely
monitored by their healthcare provider for congestive heart failure (CHF),
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, hypertension and mental
health conditions worldwide. The majority of these were post-acute patients who
have been hospitalised and discharged. As healthcare providers seek to reduce
readmission rates and track disease progression, telehealth is projected to
reach 1.8 million patients worldwide by 2017.
Ofcom says that the UK is using 20 petabytes of mobile data
a month, up from 9 petabytes this time last year. Ofcom expects the amount to
grow 80x by 2030.
Energy News
Leading industry representatives from lighting companies
across Europe have formalized and launched a governing body, LightingEurope.
The mission of the new organization is to give a voice to lighting companies of
all sizes and to promote efficient lighting practices.
LightingEurope replaces two existing organizations, the
European Lamp Companies Federation (ELC) and the Federation of National
Manufacturers Organization for Luminaires and Electrotechnical Components for
Luminaires in the European Union (CELMA). According to a press release at the
opportunity of the merger, LightingEurope regards itself as a platform to unify
the strengths of the industry to meet the challenges and opportunities created
by the current "unprecedented change in lighting technology" caused
by the ascent of LED lighting.
In the area of digital management and system communications,
the electronic power-system industry is in the process of the largest
technology integration since the introduction of the linear power supply.
Ultra-low-power processors are critical to enabling the proliferation of what
could well be called the “clutter” around the cloud.
Wireless News
Telecoms regulator Ofcom has revealed that seven companies
had qualified to bid for the new airwaves needed to roll out superfast 4G
mobile broadband across Britain. Fixed lines provider BT, managed networks firm
MLL Telecom and Hong Kong's PCCW Limited would enter the auction, Ofcom said,
as well as all of the existing mobile network operators - EE, Vodafone, O2
owner Telefonica and Hutchison, which is behind Three. Bidders will be
competing for spectrum in two separate bands - 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz, it said.
The lower frequency 800 MHz band was freed up when analogue terrestrial TV was
switched off. EE, a joint venture between France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom,
has already launched 4G services in major British cities by reallocating its
existing airwaves. The higher frequency 2.6 GHz band is ideal for delivering
the capacity needed to deliver faster speeds. These two bands add up to 250 MHz
of additional mobile spectrum, compared to 333 MHz in use today. Both bands are
being packaged into smaller lots for the auction.
This combination of low and high frequency spectrum creates
the potential for 4G mobile broadband services to be widely available across
the UK, while offering capacity to cope with significant demand in urban
centres, says Ofcom. For the typical user, download speeds of initial 4G
networks will be at least 5-7 times those for existing 3G networks.
5G will use the
700MHz frequency band – the band currently used for digital terrestrial
broadcasting – with the broadcasters moving to 600MHz. 700MHz may become the
world standard for 5G. Continental Europe, the Middle East and Africa are going
that way. If the whole world follows, as expected, it makes the cost of
equipment less. Talks on getting 700MHz adopted as the world standard are going
on at the moment.
5G is not
expected in the UK until around 2020. Following a UK group's claim to be
developing '5G' technology, a European consortium is pursuing similar goals.
Like the new UK research center, which is led by Huawei, Samsung and
Telefonica, the EU-backed METIS initiative is investigating how the wireless
world can move beyond 4G. It has a broad scope at the start, and will
investigate all kinds of options including super-dense small cell networks,
advanced beamforming and smart antenna techniques, and virtualized cloud RANs.
All these are concepts which are important to LTE, of course, but researchers
believe can be pushed to far higher limits. The first recommendations will come
in mid-2015, by which time the industry may be starting to think about next
generation platforms (though, no doubt, many firms will already have begun to
use '5G' as a marketing term by then). The group believes any technology it
comes up with will be relevant to networks being rolled out from 2020. One of
the important areas of research is the super-dense network, a step onwards from
current small cell ideas which would place cells in every room, car and
potentially on human beings. METIS (officially the Mobile and wireless
communications Enablers for the 20:20 Information Society) will get a grant of
€16m ($21.1m) from the European Union, as it looks to protect the traditionally
strong role of Europe's vendors and universities in defining wireless
standards. The effort is headed up by Ericsson, still the world's largest
wireless infrastructure supplier and one of the biggest patent holders. METIS
will tap into various existing research projects in academic institutions like
Aalborg University in Denmark and Poznan University of Technology in Poland. As
well as Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Telefonica are leading members,
along with less traditional players such as carmaker BMW.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has outlined plans to
auction off some of its radio spectrum by 2014 for services including 4G,
becoming the first government department to do so. The MoD says that 200 MHz of
its spectrum usage rights will be up for grabs, all below 15GHz, which is
regarded as the most useful and valuable part of the radio spectrum because of
the wide range of applications it can be used for. The auction will start at
the end of next year and will be completed by the middle of 2014. Prior to the
auction, the MoD will produce a brochure and host an industry day early next
summer. Almost half of all bandwidth below 15GHz is held by the public sector
and is used for services such as defence, emergency services and transport. The
government’s 2010 spending revenue stated that 500MHz of the public spectrum
below 5GHz should be released by 2020 for other uses. The MoD currently holds
around three quarters of all publicly held spectrum and one third of the
spectrum below 15 GHz. It lent some of its bandwidth to Ofcom during the 2012
Olympic Games in London in order to cope with the exceptional demand.
