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SINGAPORE: More ideas are making their way from the labs in Singapore into the real world.
The National University of Singapore Engineering Faculty estimates a 5 to 10 per cent growth in the number of research projects being patented or companies being started up over the last five years.
One such project involves the "wafer" - a palm-sized device containing millions, or possibly billions of tiny transistors, virtually invisible to the naked eye.
Measuring 25 nanometres or 4000 times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair, and only visible on screen after being magnified 90,000 times, the "wafer" is unlike other transistors of the same size fabricated elsewhere.
These, created in Singapore, are actually made of a combination of silicon and carbon - the first of its kind in the world.
"This transistor will switch or work faster than bigger ones that are in use now. So we can expect enhanced performance, speed performance. And you know in integrated circuits now used in all electronic products, [transistors are] a basic building block. If a building block works faster then the entire circuit can speed up," says Assistant professor Yeo Yee Chia, Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore.
"You can get faster computers, or you can actually squeeze more of such smaller transistors per unit area in an integrated circuit chip, therefore you get more functionalities out of your mobile phones.
"Designers of mobile phones can integrate more functions on it. And that really benefits the consumers."
And Dr Yeo is confident his invention will hit the market in the next five years - it has already caught the eye of industry players.
A semi-conductor company was so impressed, it has offered nearly S$90,000 to help Dr Yeo further develop it.
This, on top of the S$1.7m provided by Singapore's research funding agency, A*STAR.
Five months in 2004 was all it took for Dr Yeo and his NUS research team to realise their ideas.
"We have seen a general increase in terms of the number of intellectual property that has been patented. That number has been going up. And the number of companies that are set up by faculty members students is also growing," says Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore.
"And it's primarily because more and more people around the world, industry are looking towards ideas that are coming out from here. Companies are actually looking at universities for new ideas breakthrough ideas and also they're looking for total solutions plug and play and then actually expand their market.
"Essentially most companies are locating coming close to the R&D centres, the R&D hubs like the universities where research is taking place. And they want to have access to those particular knowledge ideas."
The Singapore-Delft Water Alliance is one recent example.
The S$64m collaboration involves PUB and Delft Hydraulics of Holland.
On average the engineering faculty here gets about S$25m each year to fund their projects. Nearly 100 per cent of that comes from the government.
As Singapore forges ahead to become a research and development hub for various industries, researchers hope such funding will not only increase over time, but become more flexible.
Their wish is to see more allowances provided for them to purchase new equipment to develop new ideas.
Or for them to travel overseas to international conferences to publicise their completed products.
Dr Yeo adds, "It's a good platform to network and understand the latest problems that the industry is currently facing. And coming back from conferences, we would then attack those problems in our labs."
NUS has nearly 100 research centres and institutes of various levels and disciplines. - CNA/yy
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