Dr Simon Hepworth, PraxisUnico Conference Committee member and Director of Enterprise, Development & Corporate Affairs, Imperial College London reports back on the site visit to Intel's Leixlip campus.
“Utilising the power of Moore’s law to bring smart, connected devices to every person on Earth”
This was the new company mission statement that Leonard Hobbs, Director of Global Public Affairs, explained to us, in an insightful account of Intel’s journey since the foundation of the company by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce in 1968. We heard about Robert’s belief that it would be possible to design more than one transistor onto the same piece of silicon, and Gordon’s ability to build the device.
We learned that the vast Leixlip campus is now one of only three “next generation” manufacturing sites for Intel, globally. Sadly for us the manufacturing technology is now deemed so proprietary that we were not permitted to see the clean room space in action.
Leonard acknowledged that Intel were late to the smartphone wave, and were now determined to be an active part of the next wave: the internet of things (IoT). It was therefore appropriate that we were hosted in the newly launched ‘Internet of Things Ignition Lab’ – designed to bring together scientists and engineers with local businesses, collaborating on research projects and IoT prototypes.
David Fleming and David Prendergast from Intel Labs took us through some of the exciting IoT demonstrator projects that Intel have already deployed, including air quality sensing in Hyde Park London (in collaboration with Imperial College London and UCL - http://www.cities.io/ ), and the smart stadium initiative at Croke Park (the venue of the Praxis Unico conference).
We learned too about the importance of Intel in the Irish economy, from the employment of a significant portion of the nation’s construction industry for the recent phase of fab development, through to the growing significance of the local university partnerships, whose material science discoveries had informed the company’s process development pipeline.
Many thanks to Intel for a very insightful visit!
http://www.intel.ie | Twitter: @Intel_IRL
http://www.intel.eu/labs | Twitter: @intellabseurope