NI professor joins line of distinguished researchers

Film clips on your mobile, wireless internet on your PC, and better sound and pictures on your DVD are results of the research…

Film clips on your mobile, wireless internet on your PC, and better sound and pictures on your DVD are results of the research done by John McCanny. Dick Ahlstrom reports

Prof John McCanny wants your DVD to be as sharp as possible. He also wants your CD player to deliver music that sounds as good as the original. He even wants your mobile phone to be able to play movies.

All of these innovations flow from the advanced research he directs at Queen's University. It is all about digital signal processing, enabling digital sound and video devices to handle masses of information as fast and efficiently as possible, while gobbling up very little energy.

Prof McCanny, professor of microelectronics engineering at Queen's, this weekend won the 2003 Royal Dublin Society/Irish Times Boyle Medal and Bursary. The award recognises excellence in scientific research and has been given over the past century to some of Ireland's leading scientists.

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Prof McCanny is the latest in a long line of distinguished researchers to receive the award, which is named after the father of modern chemistry, Sir Robert Boyle.

McCanny has been researching ways of improving digital signals for more than 20 years. A graduate of the University of Ulster, he is a computational physicist who developed a way to blend microchip technology and advanced mathematics to help polish and speed up digital signals passing through electronic devices.

"It is essentially going mathematics on silicon," Prof McCanny explains. "The area is called digital and image processing. What we are trying to do is take mathematical computations you might have done with programming before and put hard-wired computational structures on chips," he explains.

"It allows you to do the maths in a highly efficient way. The advantage is it is 1,000 times more efficient than using programming. It means either blazing speed or very low use of power."

Speed and low power use are the two key advantages coming from Prof McCanny's designs. It means that quite small devices, such as your mobile phone, can handle more data in a shorter time and without draining away all the battery power. This would allow short video clips to play on the mobile phone in your pocket.

He suggested ways that this technology might be used in the near future. He pictures a business commuter waiting for a flight to depart. He or she flips open their laptop computer and switches onto wireless internet, but also decides to watch a film over the net or run a DVD locally.

The laptop would support all these services on a single screen, thanks to the ability to handle massive amounts of data quickly while depending only on a small rechargeable battery.

"We are creating dedicated silicon architectures and building chips that exploit advanced mathematical algorithms. The challenge of all this is how to do it," he says. "All of these kinds of things, people take for granted you can do it. But it takes lots of computer power."

His algorithm/chip combinations give mobiles, televisions and video recorders the kind of processing capacities that will enable these new services.

His latest project is a £35 million sterling (€49 million) development under way on Queen's Island in Belfast, part of the old Harland and Wolff complex.

Called the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology, it will be based in the new Northern Ireland Science Park in what is known as the "Titanic Quarter", part of the harbour adjacent to the dry docks were HMS Titanic was built.

"This is the flagship project on the Park," says Prof McCanny. "The basis of it is we are trying to develop a new environment of innovation and company creation as part of the new knowledge economy. The intention is to be a Stanford or MIT research centre, working with blue-skies technologies and creating new companies."

He plans to use the Boyle Medal Bursary to bring in a graduate student to work on his newest research area, data encryption. He is developing new combined algorithm/hardware devices that will improve the security of data moving across the internet and new wireless communications services.