Research and development

HP’s research and development (R&D) functions are charged with innovating the next generation of technology products and services, including those that promote sustainability, while creating value for HP and its customers.

HP Labs is our central research organization. Its goals are simple:

• Advance the state of the art, as evidenced through intellectual property (IP) generation in the form of publications and patents.
• Ensure our innovations reach customers through technology transfers to existing HP businesses, new business creation and IP licensing.
• Lead and work with others in the technology community through an Open Innovation approach.

HP Labs researchers have been pursuing sustainable IT since the early 1990s, with successes including the use of inkjet technology to cool computer chips more efficiently.

Sustainability is one of the eight key themes of HP’s research strategy and is the focus of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab (SIEL), created in 2008. The sustainability high-impact research area focuses on creating technologies, IT infrastructure, and new business models for the low-carbon economy.

For example:

• Building a better data center The Sustainable Data Center’s holistic design measures everything from the material and energy resources used to extract and manufacture equipment, to facility operation, to product disposal and reclamation. The aim is a data center that consumes net zero energy from non-renewable sources over its entire life cycle.
• Tools for measuring environmental impact HP Labs is working on a breakthrough solution called Ecosystem Sustainability Assessment Tool. Its purpose is to enable product designers to make proactive decisions during design that reduce GHG emissions embedded in product materials and manufacture. This tool is being tested by HP’s Personal Systems and Imaging and Printing product groups, and has the potential for deployment beyond IT.
• Nanotechnology innovation HP Lab’s research in nanotechnology holds significant promise for electronics and photonics; the range of IT products that may benefit from such research includes anything used to gather, store, process and display information. Nanotechnology, developed with a mindful approach to materials used and careful adherence to applicable health and safety practices, has the potential to transform computing and other industries: enabling instant-on computing systems with fast, low-power, non-volatile memories; providing inexpensive but highly efficient solar cells; and creating a network of ultra-low-power sensors that could be used to monitor energy use. (See the case study on CeNSE, and our U.S. federal issue brief on this topic.)
• Replacing copper with light for improved energy efficiency The Photonic Interconnect project team is developing the technology to fit dozens, and eventually hundreds, of processors on server system chips using optical connections that are 20 times more energy efficient than technology on the market today. This will save companies vast amounts of power.
• New display technologies and print ecosystem HP Labs is developing flexible, inexpensive and portable low-power displays, e-paper surfaces and print-on-demand technology, all of which have significant potential to reduce print waste.

Visit HP Labs for additional information about innovation for the environment.

Making CeNSE

In just a few years, your house will warm up before you arrive home, a nearby bridge will notify a maintenance crew when a part needs replacement, and health officials will track the spread of viruses around the globe in real-time.

HP Labs’ Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project is helping to drive the transformation to a more sustainable world. CeNSE is a highly intelligent network comprising billions of nano-scale sensors that will feel, taste, smell, see, hear and measure what is going on in the world and communicate that information over fast, powerful computing networks for quick analysis and action. The goal: to prevent problems before they happen, and to keep small problems from becoming big, costly crises.

As part of the project, HP Labs is developing accurate, power-smart sensors that are up to 1,000 times more sensitive than existing technology. The sensors are so precise that they can hear footsteps, detect an ammonia or gas leak, feel the speed and volume at which traffic moves along a freeway, or sense wear and tear on vital equipment.

CeNSE leverages HP Labs’ breakthrough innovations in nanotechnology, networking, business analytics and optimization (see sidebar for contributing HP technologies). HP expertise and technology will enable the sensors to be fabricated and mass-produced cost-effectively. The network’s tremendous speed—typically 60 gigabytes of data per second—will depend on the development of new architectures and protocols that can quickly transport data under the most extreme conditions. CeNSE data will be collected by HP storage and computing power and made accessible to a new breed of business optimization, visualization applications and web services, making people and businesses safer, more secure and more efficient.

On the horizon

HP is teaming with customers in key industries to pilot and test CeNSE networks with up to a million nodes over the next three years. These pilot applications are expected to provide insight into the sensors and the data collected and test their operation in the real world.

CeNSE is expected to enter the marketplace in three to four years. The wide variety of business, environmental, health and safety applications make it a promising advancement for factory operations, oil and gas, merchandise tracking, large-structure integrity, virus tracking and energy management, among other things.

HP’s long-term vision is to deploy networks of billions (and eventually trillions) of highly sensitive nano-scale sensors affordably, providing a quantity and quality of data that has never before been conceivable.