Intel rejigs research structure with eyes on future

Intel Corporation has rejigged its overall research structure.

It has also rechristened its main R&D arm, the Corporate Technology Group, which boasts of some 1,000-plus R&D experts across 10 major sites including China and India, as Intel Labs.

The world’s largest chipmaker spends an estimated $6 billion per annum on research and development of products that sometimes do not even see the market. The latest move is aimed at aligning its R&D with company growth vectors and market needs, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer, vice-president and director, Intel Labs, announced the developments while kicking off the company’s annual show-and-tell event, the Research@Intel Day, at the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara on Thursday.

He also announced that there would be six business groups aligned to Intel Labs, apart from five R&D streams including a new integrated platforms research group, which will be a unified lab focused on platforms for small handheld devices. This new group, kicked off in the March quarter, has some 200-plus scientists, Rattner told DNA.

The goal is to improve the likelihood of impact and alignment of research activities with Intel’s focus areas such as mobility, visual computing and system-on-chip where many more computing and communications functions are placed on a single piece of silicon, Rattner said later, delivering the keynote at the Research@Intel Day.

“The new organisation will identify game-changing opportunities for tech innovation and deliver breakthrough discoveries in those areas,” he added.

Interestingly, Intel had 40 future technologies on display at the event, compared with 70 last year. Rattner attributed this to people’s fatigue, rather than to any reduction in research activity at Intel.

All the same, the showcase was indicative of what Intel is betting on for future growth — wireless technology and small form factor devices like mobile internet devices and handhelds.

The company demonstrated various technologies its researchers were working on with an eye on putting the power of the internet in people’s pockets and making browsing it a richer experience.

Towards this, Intel displayed a working prototype of the ‘Moorestown’ a future series
of the Atom chips, which have become a rage, powering the popular netbooks. Moorestown is targeted at mobile internet devices and helps reduce consumption by devices such as netbooks and handhelds when they are in the idle mode by 50 times, lengthening battery life.

On display were also technologies for 3D web, advanced visual computing and other futuristic concepts such as a beta website for telling people if they are being duped by content on the Net, and silicon photonics to speed up chips by using pulses of light on silicon. The company maintains that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years.

“We are hard at work to demonstrate a complete silicon photonics transceiver this year,” Rattner said, but refused to give out the computing power these chips would have.

Also on display was a technology for transmitting power wirelessly by using coupled resonators, which show the potential of turning the now ubiquitous laptops into virtual transmitters to power multiple handheld devices, Intel executives said. Two flat copper coils — a transmitter and a receiver — are used, each tuned to resonate at a particular frequency.

While many of these technologies are in the realm of the future, some pertaining to mobility and internet user interface are set to reach the market in the not-too-distant future.