The University of Wollongong's (UOW) Wireless Technologies Laboratory claims to be the only one of its kind in Australia working on ultrawideband (UWB).
The Lab was established in early 2004 after UOW was successful in winning a research team comprising seven members from Motorola Research Labs.
“Our lab is the only one in the country with the potential to undertake this scale of research, and we have some of the biggest IT companies in the world fighting for the technology,”says the Lab's Professor Eryk Dutkiewiczhe. “The [UOW] is also the only Australian member of the UWB forum.”
With some early UWB products reaching the market, the UOW team is working on standards development and laboratory testing that will result in regulatory approval for this wireless technology becoming available to the Australian public.
The Wireless Technologies Laboratory is part of UOW's Faculty of Informatics and has a number of links with institutions throughout Asia and Europe and collaborative agreements with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (equivalent to the CSIRO) and Shanghai's Jiao Tong University.
International UWB standards are being developed by the IEEE Standards Association and Australia has recently hosted the only IEEE UWB standards meeting this year outside of North America.
Professor Dutkiewicz said the lab is on its way to becoming a centre of excellence in Australia for UWB research.