NTIA Awards First Grants Under Supply Chain Innovation Fund

NTIA announced the first three winners under the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, a $1.5 billion federal fund aimed at spurring the growth of open radio access networks and advanced spectrum sharing. NTIA unveiled the grants Tuesday at Northeastern University in Boston, one of the recipients.

Northeastern is getting $1.99 million for “creation of a fine-grain, end-to-end, and accurate energy efficiency testing platform … which will enable the construction of sustainable and energy-efficient wireless networks,” said a news release. New York University gets $2 million to fund testing for open, secure and adaptive spectrum sharing. The broad goal of the NYU project is developing “testing and evaluation procedures for open and interoperable solutions” for next generation networks “with a focus on both shared and adversarial spectrum scenarios,” NTIA said.

Virginia-based DeepSig gets a grant of almost $1.5 million for an R&D program to improve “the fidelity, speed and repeatability” of ORAN air-interface performance testing by “employing data and AI to model the propagation and interference environment more accurately and efficiently,” NTIA said: “This program will create a new set of standard ORAN air-interface performance measurement tools and scenarios that will revolutionize the evaluation of interoperable ORAN components under real world conditions.”

The funding appears to be the first awarded under the $54.2 billion Chips and Science Act, signed into law a year ago (see 2208090062), said David Madigan, Northeastern provost and senior vice president-academic affairs, at the event. ORAN can drive improvements in wireless “that will not just reshape industries but also reshape daily life,” he said.

The school has branches in 14 locations in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, Madigan noted. “We have partnerships with thousands of employers all over the world,” he said. The school's research is “very much oriented towards high-impact problem-solving in the world,” he said.

Today’s wireless equipment market remains “highly consolidated” with a few companies manufacturing the components needed by 5G networks, said Amanda Toman, director of the innovation fund. “Some of those equipment vendors pose national security risks,” she said. “The result is a wireless equipment market where costs are high and resilience is low and American companies are increasingly shut out,” she said: The innovation fund “aims to change that.”

The NYU project targets the upper mid-band, “a promising new frequency range that has attracted considerable interest from wireless carriers,” said Sundeep Rangan, NYU Wireless associate director. “Systems in these frequencies will likely need to be adaptive and agile to utilize the wide bandwidth and directionally communicate,” Rangan said: The project will look at “how this spectrum agility can be tested for both dynamic spectrum sharing and resiliency to attacks -- two vital features of these bands."

The innovation fund will “catalyze new ways to build open and interoperable networks,” Toman said. “This will help secure our supply chain and create opportunities for companies from the U.S. and our allies.” Leadership in technology is “a key priority for the Biden administration,” she said. Toman said her team is already working on the next series of grants.

NTIA plans to make up to $140.5 million available in this first funding round (see 2307180076). NTIA received 127 applications requesting $1.39 billion in grants, almost 10 times the amount of funding available.

“These investments in the next generation of wireless innovation will help create a more diverse and resilient marketplace and ensure that American companies and entrepreneurs, along with our allies, remain at the cutting edge of this crucial technology,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.