€5m boost to see top firms' work at facility

SOME of the leading global and Irish names in technological and medical devices will have their key research work carried out in a Cork facility under a €5 million investment by Enterprise Ireland over the next five years. The reputation of the Tyndall National Institute – which also had its new €49m research building opened by Tánaiste and Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister Mary Coughlan yesterday – in supporting firms like Intel, Seagate, Medtronic and Analog Devices, is expected to boost the country's ability to attract inward investment by major international companies.

The work to be conducted there as part of the new Competence Centre for Applied Nanotechnology (CANN) will include finding better ways of delivering drugs and improved diagnostics for the health sector, while better storage and memory capacity for electronic devices will also be developed, according to Enterprise Ireland research and innovation manager Martin Lyes.

Intel Ireland managing director Jim O'Hara said the work there will help to solve health problems and how the world develops its methods of communication.

"This centre will be integral to the way countries and the entire world develop, including how we solve the world's energy problems, and the people in this building have a huge role to play in all those areas," he said.

Mr O'Hara said semiconductors for computer chips have come from having 2,000 transistors when he first worked in the industry in the early 1970s to having more than two billion today.

"It's all about doubling the amount of power in a particular unit of silicon and halving the cost, and at the same time reducing the energy. But anyone who thinks the limits have been reached should know that further developments will be continuing for a few years to come," he said.

Funding for the extension to the Tyndall National Institute was approved by Ms Coughlan's predecessor, Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin, in 2006. Its state-of-the-art facilities will allow world-leading research be conducted in Cork, where the CANN centre activities will be led in collaboration with researchers at Trinity College Dublin's nanotechnology centre and Dublin City University. The Irish industry partners are Aerogen, Audit Diagnostics, Creganna and Proxy Biomedical, and IDA Ireland will also be involved.

Much of Tyndall's ongoing work is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, whose director general, Professor Frank Gannon, said the new facility is further evidence of the institute's upward trajectory in enhancing Ireland's research infrastructure and international reputation.

Tyndall chief executive Prof Roger Whatmore said the work done there over the last decade would now be translated into real world solutions by the centre's Irish-based industry partners.