New Building for Calit2, New Connectivity for UCSD Engineering

The Calit2 building opening coincided with the Jacobs School completing a major bandwidth upgrade. It installed 10Gb pipes to all of its buildings on campus— one of the first engineering schools to do so—allowing faculty and students to upload or download data to/from the Internet at up to 10 billion bits per second.

The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) dedicated its headquarters at UCSD in late October. The 215,000square foot Atkinson Hall, named in honor of former UC President Richard C. Atkinson, will house more than 900faculty, staff, and student researchers, connected over 1.8 million feet of Gigabit Ethernet cable. Calit2's shared laboratories include clean rooms for nanofabrication, digital theaters for new media arts and scientific visualization, test and measurement labs for circuit design, smart spaces for experiments in augmented reality, transmission and networking testbeds for wireless and optical communications, and labs for designing systems on a chip. "We have taken the road less traveled—juxtaposing people and programs in uncommon proximity to maximize the opportunity for experts from different disciplines to work together," says Ramesh Rao, Calit2 division director at UCSD and a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School.