India's Indigenous 5G Tech Developed By IITs Transferred To Tejas Networks For Commercial Use

The 5G RAN technology, created by two IITs and MeiTY's R&D division, was officially transferred to an Indian technology firm for further development and commercial use.

The license was officially transferred to Tejas Networks, a company under the Tata group, by the Indian Institutes of Technology in Madras and Kanpur, along with MeiTY's R&D division, the Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research (Sameer). This transfer, which took place at IIT Madras on Monday, was valued at Rs 12 crore.

The industry partner, Tejas, has made a non-exclusive license fee payment for the transfer of technology, which was paid in several instalments, each based on technical milestones, The Hindu reported.

V Kamakoti, the director of IIT Madras, hailed it as an exemplary instance of the way translational research should be conducted in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary fashion. He added, "This is a great example of how research should translate into a product and then get deployed.”

The director of IIT Kanpur, S Ganesh, revealed that the institute's faculty had engineered the baseband unit of the 5G NR base station. This accomplishment was part of a collaborative project that involved eight different institutes and was financially backed by the Department of Telecommunications to develop the 5G test bed.

The co-founder and chief technical officer of Tejas Networks described this as a fresh milestone in the partnership between industry and academia.