The new center already received support from more than 40 companies and academic institutions with strong interests in the 6G field
The University of Sheffield said it is set to open what it claims to be the first national 6G research facility in the U.K.
In a release, the University of Sheffield said that the new UKRI National 6G Radio Systems Facility will give the U.K. world-class research and development (R&D) capabilities in the 6G space.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the facility will play a key role in driving innovation in as-yet-unstandardized 6G systems by bringing together academics and industrial partners and giving them the specialist equipment needed to collaborate and develop globally leading 6G solutions, according to the university.
The new facility, which will be based in the university’s Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, received support from more than 40 companies and academic institutions with strong interests in the 6G field.
Timothy O’Farrell, professor of wireless communication at the University of Sheffield, who will be the head of the new facility, said: “6G is the next generation of telecommunications technology and has fast become a strategically important area for research and development. If the U.K. is to maintain its place as a global leader in telecommunications then we need the specialist equipment that our academics and industrial partners can use to innovate and develop next generation 6G technologies.
“The national facility we are creating at the University of Sheffield will play a huge role in the U.K.’s 6G capabilities,” he added.
The University of Sheffield also highlighted that the new facility will enable cutting edge research into many aspects of 6G radio systems, including candidate waveforms, transmitter and receiver circuits, digital acquisition and signal processing, antenna arrays and over-the-air (OTA) propagation measurements. Also, the new center will be capable of supporting research into 6G radio systems spanning all of the operating frequency bands – from sub-6GHz to sub-THz—including the 6G pioneering band at 220GHz.
The facility’s key equipment will support multiple over-the-air transmissions at once, facilitating research into novel advanced radio systems.
In December 2022, the U.K. government announced that it is putting 110 million pounds (about $132 million) into support for 5G and 6G-related telecom research and development.
The funding will include 28 million pounds that will be shared among the University of York, University of Bristol and University of Surrey to team up with Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung to work out what it will take to design and build as-yet-unstandardized future networks like 6G, with a focus on support for “a more diverse and innovative telecoms market, and [bringing] an end to current network setups where all equipment within a network must be from a single supplier,” according to a government release.
The U.K. government also will put 80 million pounds into a new telecom lab being build in in Solihull in the West Midlands, which will be a secure research facility and where work on research and testing of 5G and future 6G security mechanisms can be tested.
In November last year, Ericsson had announced a ten-year investment initiative in the U.K. focused on 6G research and development. The vendor said it will invest tens of millions of British pounds in research areas including network resilience and security, artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive networks and network efficiency.
