Hong Kong Research and Development Centre for Information and Communications Technologies (HK R&D Centre for ICT) is hosted by the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited (ASTRI). ASTRI began its operations in 2001 to capture the opportunities for technological advances for Hong Kong through applied research. In the past few years, ASTRI has successfully built a team of excellent researchers conducting leading edge research in information and communications technologies.

What We Offer
The R&D Centre for ICT focuses on four closely interrelated technological domains - Communications Technologies, Consumer Electronics, Integrated Circuit (IC) Design, and Opto-electronics.

The Centre aims to bring strategic technology 'applications' that are transferable to the industry base in the Greater Pearl River Delta (GPRD) to enhance their competitiveness. It draws on the research expertise and project management experience of ASTRI to ensure that high quality research will be conducted in economical, transparent and accountable manners.

Why Join Us?
With the human resource edge built by ASTRI over the years, the R&D Centre for ICT strives to conduct world-class applied technology research. By adopting "Customer-focused R&D" as its unique core business model, the Centre aims to continuously establish a substantial amount of significant intellectual properties (IPs) that can be transferred to industry, offering great opportunities to help technology companies in the GPRD region capture the promises of China's technological rise, thereby adding a new dimension to Hong Kong's economic future.

Communications Technologies
The Centre aims to provide world class innovative and competitive wireless communications technologies addressing the needs of industries in the GPRD region. Current projects of the Centre include internal antenna CoE, wireless home AV distribution platform, practical MIMO core, WiFi cellular system, reconfigurable OFDM core, broadband wireless access (WiMAX) platform, customisable wireless management system, and advanced UWB technology development platform.

Consumer Electronics
The Centre aims to create and expand Hong Kong owned core IP for multimedia over Internet Protocol technology and for networked consumer electronics and applications to enhance the competitiveness of local industries by helping the industries move up the value chain. The following research areas have been identified: digital broadcasting, home media networking, portable media, multimedia communications, and digital living platform.

IC Design
The Centre aims to focus on technologies and skills for developing complex system-on-chip solutions that feature small form factor and low power consumption. The developed technologies will be delivered in the form of actual IC implementations, IP cores, and design libraries. The advanced IC design expertise gained by our host institute will be applied to support IC design industry in the GPRD region to migrate to the next level of competitiveness in the worldwide market. Among the various projects of the group are video compression/decompression IC for mobile handset, Java accelerator IC for mobile handset, low-power MCU (micro-controller unit) architecture platform, low power multimedia SoC platform, nanometer memory, and portable analog mix-signal IC design.

Opto-electronics
The Centre aims to develop high-value, next generation products, devices and component applications that are promising for the industry in the GPRD region. The core technology platforms of the group include smart optical sensors, low cost fiber optics transmitters, light emitting diode (LED) technology, electronic packaging, product-oriented system-in-packaging (SiP) technologies, LED backlight units, material technologies for semiconductor heat dissipations, and energy storage devices.