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Nokia Receives $1.35B Grant To Develop Graphene Tech
silverpig writes "It now appears that graphene has reached a point worthy of serious, direct industrial attention. The grant money itself comes from the European Union for the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), but the work will be done by a large non-governmental company with eyes on developing useful real-world applications. Smartphones contain many components with high potential for making use of graphene. From the article: 'Nokia is leading the electronic firms within the Graphene Flagship Consortium, which includes 73 other companies and academic institutions from a number of mediums. The Finnish handset manufacturer has received a grant of $1.35 billion to research and develop graphene for practical applications, with the European Union for the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) providing the grant itself.'"
Both the tech that comes from it, and the funding process model if it is successful. I wonder how much Nokia is going to try to solo this project vs. working with other science entities. This has the potential of showing the world either how to, or how not to, do research. It's too bad that the US and the EU can't work together in a more efficient way to develop material sciences. How much tech is being held up by the slow advances in materials development? Batteries, solar, next-gen computing, ect, ect, ect. At least someone is starting to push hard into this.
Nokia is involved in a graphene research program along with 73 other companies. The research program gets 1 billion euros over 10 years. Nokia will probably only get a fraction of that money.
this is a unusually grossly wrong submission having gotten to the /. frontpage. The gross project funding amounts to EUR 1 billion (approx. USD 1.35 billion) which is allocated to all the over 100 participant institutions, companies and groups - of which Nokia is only one. The effort is led by Chalmers University of Sweden.
Just read an interesting article today about using boron as a possible graphene alternative.
"When we talk about graphene, we’ve reached a tipping point. We’re now looking at the beginning of a graphene revolution. Before this point in time, we figured out a way to manufacture cheap iron that led to the Industrial Revolution. Then there was silicon. Now, it’s time for graphene."
This is something that I've been looking forward to for various reasons: plenty of cheap carbon available, perhaps carbon circuitry will integrate better with biology, and I believe that electric conductivity between covalently joined atoms (as in graphene and nanotubes) is the way towards viable superconductors.
... but I can't seem to find the answer to my question in the article.
What exactly are they going to be using the graphene for? ... Your own personal space elevator?!?
Is it going to be used for the actual conductive material on circuit boards?
Is it going to be used to improve cellphone antennas?
Is it going to be used to greatly increase the structural integrity of the phone casing and/or screen?
Is it going to be used for some new smell-o-vision capabilities in future phones?!
Heat-sink? Transistors?
Karma: NaN
Probably, but you just know that PC World will be flooded with articles about how the new Graphene interface based phones will take over the business cell phone market, and Endgadget will have a dozen articles by 2 authors about how Apple had developed it first and how the Apple products being released into the market have a much slicker implementation.
People of course will be dropping both editions into the toilet.
You never know...
It had better NOT be the beneficiaries of this largesse... the corporations can have licenses as a reward for doing the donkey work, but the patents should belong to the people whose money is being used...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The FET flagship projects, of which this is one, have a budget of up to 100 million euro per year. The amount contributed by the EU will be considerably lower, as this number includes costs borne by the project members that are not reimbursed by the EU.
According to the rules governing these kinds of EU projects, Nokia will be able to request reimbursment for up to 50% of their R&D costs in the project. The actual levels of reimbursment may be lower, depending on how the budget is allocated. The EU is actually pretty aggressive about ensuring that money is actually spent in accordance with the contract that the project members are required to sign.
But way, there's more!
The press release from the project itself states that the initial 30 months have a budget of only 54 million euro and involve 126 different research groups. We don't know yet what the project will look like after that initial phase since new participants and activities will be added through an open (i.e. competitive call). Based on my experience, the project will almost certainly use the full 1 billion euro, eventually, but there's know way to know how those funds will be allocated, yet.
Nokia's share of the budget by the end of the project? My guess would be at the very most 50 million euro over ten years (of which they about half from the EU and have to put up the rest themselves), but that is just a guess.
Why Nokia ?
First of all, there are a lot of reputable research labs in Europe.
Second of all, Graphene can be used in A WIDE RANGE OF DIFFERENT FIELDS, --- from medical research to electronics to military to environmental science --- smartphone is just _one_ of the many.
Personally I think many other research labs are more deserving of the research grant than Nokia.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Would using graphene as a kind of laser printer toner, allow us to print out circuit boards on paper? or does it need to be in a structure, that would prevent the electrical properties of the fused dust being useful?