Imagination Technologies joins 5G Innovation Centre

Joining as a Gold Member, the company will invest significant resources into 5GIC over the next five years, including both people and IP platforms, to help 5GIC develop technologies that will be highly scalable and easily deployable by the widest possible semiconductor, electronics goods and service provider community. Imagination is already working with 5GIC in the development of standards relevant to 5G.

The company’s Executive Vice President of Marketing, Tony King-Smith, will join the 5GIC Strategic Advisory Board.

The 5GIC is a new UK-based research centre, backed by both the UK government and leading global industry players, dedicated to enabling next-gen mobile communications. Other members of the 5GIC include major telecomms service providers and mobile device manufacturers. Bringing together leading academic expertise and key industry partners in a shared vision, the 5GIC will help to define and develop the 5G infrastructure that will underpin the way we communicate, work and live our everyday lives in the future.

5G will be a flexible infrastructure capable of handling consumers’ increasing demands for mobile data and providing ubiquitous connectivity for emerging markets such as the IoT.

Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination, says: “As we enter the next wave of innovation in a truly connected world, communications must move to a fundamentally new level. Previous generations of network technology have been voice-centric, with data as an ‘add-on’. With 5G, data is at the heart of the concept. 5G will deliver more efficiency, lower power and better robustness, but also connect everything in the world of IoT. And that can no longer be limited to the cities, as a sizable deployment of IoT devices will be in rural and sparsely populated regions of the world. We look forward to working with 5GIC and partners around the world to help deliver this important global technology.”

“5G must be capable of addressing the requirements of a highly connected future which will depend on state-of-the-art, efficient and highly scalable processing technologies,” comments King-Smith. “It is therefore a logical step for Imagination to work with leading organisations like 5GIC to help define this important standard that will be inextricably linked to our range of advanced processor IP cores and platforms.”

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Director of the 5GIC and Institute of Communication Systems, says: “We welcome the unique and valuable perspective Imagination will bring to the team at 5GIC. Imagination complements the other members, which will enable us to address not only the operator and device manufacturers but, thanks to Imagination, also the needs of the global semiconductor industry.”