Bell Labs celebrates 100 years, headquarters plans

This year, Bell Labs celebrates its one hundred birthday. At a century celebrations held last week at Murray Hill, NJ, Campus, the impressive technical history of the lab was observed with talks, panels, demos, and more than half a dozen beautiful Nobel Prize winners.

During his impressive 100 -year tenure, scientists at Bell Labs invented the transistor; Reduced theoretical grounding for the digital age; Discovered radio astronomy, which caused the first evidence for Big Bang Theory; Contributed to the invention of laser; The unixed operating system developed; Invented the charged device (CCD) camera; And many more scientific and technical contributions are acquired Bell Labs 10 Nobel Prize and Five Turing Awards.

“I usually tell people that this ‘Bell Labs has invented everything’,” Nokia Bell Labs Archives said Ed Acart As he led a tour through the history exhibition of the lab.

The lab is smaller than once. Murray Hill, the main campus in NJ, looks like a ghost city, with empty cubals and lining in office halls. It is now planning a step for a small convenience in New Breanswick, NJ, which is in 2027 at some time. In his hedi, Bell Labs boasted about 6,000 workers at the dead hill place. Although this number is now reduced to around 1,000, it works more in other places around the world.

Many achievements of Bell Labs

Despite its somewhat low size, Bell Labs, which is now owned by Nokia, is alive and kicking.

“As Nokia Bell Labs, we have a dual mission,” says the chairman of Bell Labs Peter waiter“On the one hand, we need to support the longevity of the main occupation. It is network, mobile network, optical network, large, safety, device research, asics, networking on the optical component that supports that network system. And then we also have a second part of the mission, which is to help the company grow in new areas.”

Some new areas for development were depicted in live performances in Sentenial.

A team of Bell Labs is working on setting up the first cellular network on the moon. In February, the intuitive machines sent their second lunar mission, Ethena on board with the technique of Bell Labs. The team fits two full cellular networks into a briefcase-shaped box, which is the most compact networking system ever. This cell network was self-tainted: no one on earth needs to tell what to do. Lunar Lander touched the landing from his behalf and quickly turned offline due to lack of solar energy, but the networking module of Bell Labs had enough time to bring and transmit data on Earth.

Another Bell Labs Group focuses on the monitoring of the world’s vast network of undergrass fiber-optic cables. Unders are subject to cable obstacles, whether it is unfavorable sabotage, weather events such as earthquakes or tsunamis, or fishing nets and ship anchors. The team wants to convert these cables into a sensor network, capable of monitoring the environment around a cable for potential damage. The team has developed a real-time technique to monitor mild changes in the length of the cable, so sensitive that the lab-based demo was able to take small vibrations from the presenter’s speaking voice. This technique can pin changes in a gap of 10 kilometers of cable, which can simplify the discovery of affected areas.

When it comes to quantum computing, Nokia is traveling less, pursuing the so -called topological quantum bits. These qbits, if made, will be much stronger for noise than other approaches, and are more easily responsible for scaling. However, the construction of a single such quit has been elusive. Nokia Bell Labs’ Robert Villate It has been on this since its graduation in 1988, and the team hopes to perform the first gate with this architecture later this year.

Beam-starring antennas for point-to-point fixed wireless are usually made on printed circuit boards. But as the world moves towards high frequencies, towards 6G, the traditional printed circuit-board material is no longer cutting it-the building los makes them financially unacceptable. This is why a team of Nokia Bell Labs has developed a way to print circuit boards on glass instead. The result is a small glass chip with a 64 integrated circuit on one side and an antenna array on the other side. A 100-Gigahrtz link using Tech was posted in the Paris Olympics in 2024, and a commercial product for 2027 is on road map.

Mining, especially autonomous mining – which prevents humans in the way of damage – heavy on networking. This is why Nokia has entered the mining business, developed a smart digital-twin technique that models the mine and autonomous trucks working on it. The company’s robo-truck system has two cellular modem, three Wi-Fi cards and 12 ethernet ports. The system collects a variety of sensor data and corrects them on a virtual map of the mine (digital twin). It then uses AI to suggest necessary maintenance and optimize scheduling.

The lab is also taking a dip in AI. A team is working on integrating large language models with robots for industrial applications. These robots have access to the digital-twin model of the location that they are and some objects in their surroundings have a meaningful representation. In a demo, a robot was asked to identify the missing boxes in a rack orally. The robot successfully stated which box was not found at its desired place, and when indicated, it traveled to the storage area and identified the replacement. The key is to build robots that can say “cause of the physical world” Matthew AndrewsA researcher in AI Lab. A test system will be deployed in a warehouse in the United Arab Emirates in the next six months.

Despite influential scientific performances, there was an air of apprehension about the event. In a panel discussion about the future of innovation, Princeton Engineering Dean Andrea Goldsmith Said, “I am never more concerned about innovation ecosystem in America” ​​East Google CEO Eric shmit A keynote speaker said that “the current administration is trying to destroy the university R&D”. Nevertheless, Schmidt and others expressed optimism about the future of Bel Labs and the United States innovation. “We will win, because we are right, and R&D is the foundation for economic development,” he said.