Alberta continues to solidify its growing reputation as a hotbed of wireless research and development with a new $3.42-million project to improve next-generation cellphone technology.

“The Star Trek communicator, once a figment of our imaginations, now lies within our grasp,” said Roger Pederson, president of TRLabs, one of three major funding partners behind the project.

The University of Calgary-based program launched last week is one of several on campus backed by the Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence (iCORE), a government-backed funding agency that targets informatics and communication technology.

The jointly funded industrial chair will support U of C electrical and computer engineering professor Dr. Jim Haslett and a team of researchers – dubbed “The Wireless Cowboys” – as they probe how to improve short-range wireless communication through better system-on-chip (SOC) design.

Photo courtesy Greg Fulmes/iCORE
The U of C's Jim Haslett is leading a team of iCORE-funded researchers to improve cellphone communication.

“The bottom line is, at this point, most radio transmitter receiver systems involve a combination of different technologies,” Haslett said at the official launch of the program at the Alberta Research Council’s offices in Calgary.

But he added there’s a growing industry-wide push for increased SOC functionality, and the team will work on designing advanced analog circuits on chips that send and receive bits of data.

Haslett, a former head of the department of electrical and computer engineering at the U of C, was selected as a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada last year, and has won 14 teaching awards over the past 27 years.

“We’ve got a guy here who knows how to preach what he practises,” said Ron Bond, vice-president (academic) at the U of C.

The research holds the promise of smaller, cheaper, power-conserving devices with broader bandwidth and greater portability, added Pederson.

“The next generation of wireless devices, in what they do and how they function, will remove the technological barriers that have constrained their ubiquity,” he said.

The iCORE grant will provide $1 million over the five-year research term, while another $120,000 a year comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) with a matching contribution from TRLabs.

The U of C will add $164,000 a year for five years – $20,000 in cash and the remainder in kind. The research will be carried out in direct collaboration with TRLabs and its industrial partners – major sponsors include General Dynamics, Lucent, TELUS and Samsung.

Wireless research at the University in Edmonton is also making waves with the help of iCORE funding. Earlier this year, digital communications expert Christian Schlegel was recruited to the U of A’s electrical and computer engineering department from the University of Utah to look into ways of preventing bottlenecks in busy wireless networks.

Meanwhile, both Alberta universities have again ranked among the top 10 post-secondary institutions across Canada in their ability to attract research dollars.

According to a study released last week by Research Infosource Inc., a division of consulting firm The Impact Group, the University of Alberta was fourth in Canada last year with research income at $240.5 million in 2001, an increase of 16.4 per cent over 2000.

The University of Calgary ranked eighth, attracting $172.1 million in funding support, a 27.9-per-cent increase.

“With commitment and collaboration from government and industry, Alberta universities continue to make impressive gains,” said Research Infosource president Ron Freedman.

The survey also tracked research intensity (dollars per full-time faculty) and, last year, Alberta institutions were up 16 per cent over 2000, leading the pack with $135,600. Alberta’s three universities accounted for $417.9 million of the $3.4 billion in sponsored research income brought in by Canada’s leading universities in 2001.

The list ranked Canada’s leading universities by sponsored research income from both government and non-government sources.