How to operate VICTORIES

Director of the innovation hub
Haruyuki Yoneda
Senior Innovation Coordinator

The Vertically Integrated Center for Technologies of Optical Routing toward Ideal Energy Savings (VICTORIES) is part of the Creation of Innovation Center for Fusion of Advanced Technologies project of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. It is intended to produce fundamental technologies that will enable the development of network communications, capable of handling the enormous throughput that will be required by future generations, with a power consumption three orders of magnitude lower than the current level.  Established with financial and personnel cooperation from five private companies (NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.,  Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd., Trimatiz Ltd. and NEC Corporation), the continuation of this project was approved in 2010 after strict screening, and five more private companies were added (Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Cable, Ltd., Fujikura Ltd., Alnair Labs Corporation and Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.). In 2013, Kitanihon Electric Cable Co., Ltd. joined as a collaborating company, succeeding Hitachi Cable, Ltd. Going forward, we will step up our R&D activities into both underlying technologies and those for practical, large-scale application. We will integrate the elemental technologies we have developed and implement a testbed demonstration to show the true operational capabilities of Dynamic Optical Path Network technologies in the fall of 2014.

These are all challenging and require AIST to change the way of thinking it has had up until now. Otherwise, it will not be able to be the core of collaboration between the industrial world and universities. The center aims to establish a technology base that enables extremely low energy network architectures by integrating silicon photonics device technologies and optical path conditioning technologies and further integrating them with higher layer network application interface technologies in order to realize the concept of telecommunications networks of the generation after the next generation. The research issues are described in detail in other sections.

Network Photonics Research Center, Information Technology Research Institute, Nanoelectronics Research Institute and Innovation Center for Advanced Nanodevices in AIST, collaborate with and supplement each other to develop center activities. We also request that participant companies promote vertical collaboration in their research and development activities. In order to promote effective vertical and horizontal collaboration, the center has an innovation hub function. In order to create an environment that helps our partner companies and AIST concentrate on developing advanced and innovative technologies, our partners have agreed that, as a rule, they will cross-license the intellectual properties created during this center's activities.

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, increasing priority has been given to drastic lowering power consumption in all fields of business. Improving the stability of telecommunications networks is another important issue. AIST hopes to promote VICTORIES' activities while considering and discussing how technical issues can be resolved and how positive innovations can be brought about in social systems. Such values and management are essential to the shift in focus to sustainable development society the President mentioned in his greetings. In order to promote center activities for innovations based on a concurrent model rather than a liner model, we would like to administer the center through serious discussions not only in AIST, but also with universities and the industrial world with a broad perspective and in a flexible manner. We would like to ask for your active cooperation in achieving this goal.