Oscillators, says Prof Peter Kennedy, head of UCC's new microelectronics engineering department, are the very stuff of life. The Royal Irish Academy agrees and has just presented Prof Kennedy, a world expert in wireless communications and circuit design, with its inaugural Parsons Award in the engineering sciences.
Oscillators transmit signals within the human body - from the heart to the brain, for instance. They are used in the chips that drive our television sets and watches and in global positioning satellites, which tell yachtsmen where they are. They are at the core of all advances in information technology. Without them, says Prof Kennedy, we wouldn't work and neither would anything else. "If there were no oscillators, there would be no life. It is a fundamental truth." The academy award, sponsored by Siemens, honours Charles Algernon Parsons of Birr Castle. He invented the Parson's Turbine, which revolutionised marine transport, and the firm he later founded is now part of the Siemens electronics conglomerate.
Prof Kennedy's academic travels have taken him from UCD to the University of California at Berkeley and back to UCD before taking up his new post at UCC.
"I think Cork is becoming Ireland's Silicon Valley," he says. "The city is a centre of excellence for the electronics industry and, through UCC, the National Microelectronics Research Centre (NMRC) and the CIT, is producing high-calibre graduates who have become leaders in the IT sector. "It is not a coincidence that many of the major players are locating in Cork and becoming more involved in design activity, because that is where the future is," he says. Prof Kennedy believes that by 2015 microelectronics will be the largest industry in the world, and that those companies which are now deploying resources in the design area will be its leaders.
Cork, he forecasts, will be Ireland's leading centre for microelectronics design, and the overall prosperity of the region will be raised as a result. Much of the credit for what is happening in the sector today, he adds, should go to Prof Gerry Wrixon, who founded the NMRC and is now president of UCC.P}