Νew Technologies and Innovation Development in Russia

A team of researchers at St. Petersburg State University (SPSU) has developed what is believed to be an advanced new laser, Popnano.ru reported.

It is said to be what’s called a boson cascade laser, developed at SPSU’s optics laboratory led by Alexey Kavokin.

The laser is expected to have a broad range of applications. For example, it could be used to help treat skin cancer or guard areas against robbers or terrorists.

The RVC Infrafund has teamed up with a group of yet-undisclosed private investors to jointly finance the setup of the Digital Port Tech Entrepreneurship Center in the city of Perm in the West Urals, East-West Digital News, the first all English-language online resource dedicated to Russian digital industries, reported earlier this week, citing the official RVC website.

The 2000-sq. meter facility is expected to offer young local innovative teams and startups both office space and a range of services to support the development of high tech businesses, such as IT outsourcing, training programs in technology entrepreneurship, marketing support, IP protection advice, search for investors, bookkeeping, and HR assistance, among others.

Authorities in the Republic of Sakha, a large region in Russia’s Far East also known as Yakutia, have approved an architectural design for the area’s first IT Park, a construction project initially announced a year ago with a 2015 deadline. The project will take the form of a large black 12-story cube with a winter garden, East-West Digital News, the first all English-language online resource dedicated to Russian digital industries, reported last week, citing a source in the Sakha Government.

Now slated for completion in early 2016, the park will be located in Yakutsk, the region’s capital, and is expected to deplete regional coffers by an estimated $23m.

The authorities in Irkutsk, in Siberia, have decided to start repairing local street roads using what’s known as ‘nanoasphalt,’ a new product tested last year on one of the city streets, the Baikal office of Moskovsky Komsomolets reported.

According to Irkutsk Mayor Viktor Kondrashov, the move will add another 8% to the overall cost of new asphalt.

“The local asphalt factory is beginning this year to use all necessary additives to produce nanoasphalt which we will be using from now on to repair large sections of roads. It will cost us more, but we have consciously decided to do so to increase the quality of our roads,” the mayor said.

Last fall, a small 400 square meter testing area on Voronezhskaya Street was repaired using the new asphalt-bitumen coating based on nanomodified components. The modified asphalt has reportedly proven stronger and more durable than conventional one. The softening temperature for its binder agent is plus 60 degrees Celsius, and the product withstands freezing temperatures of as low as minus 32 degrees Celsius, which is expected to triple the service life of such a road carpet.

The product has been developed by local Nanotechcenter. To make this new asphalt the company first makes polymers using aluminum and silicon production waste.

According to Nanotechcenter, the technology calls for the use of the developer’s proprietary polymer- and nanomodifier-based mineral compound which is added to asphalt-concrete. Polymers are added into what’s known as dolomite flour, a mandatory ingredient of asphalt-concrete, rather than into bitumen itself. In the additive, a special composition is used which includes carbon nanoparticles. Such molecular compounds are believed to possess unique properties.

A new Center for Vibration Diagnostics and Balancing, Russia’s first east of the Ural Mountains, has opened at Tomsk Polytechnic University in Siberia, TPU announced in its press release.

In addition to training students and re-training industrial staff the Center is expected to help introduce counter-emergency systems to industry.

The $700+K Center is a joint effort by TPU, Diamech 2000, a sizable local equipment maker, and Russia’s Bortnik Fund. According to Sergei Bukhanchenko of TPU’s Research Institute of Cybernetics, the Center will “exclusively” run equipment developed in Russia and “second to no foreign analogs in quality.”

“All oil refineries, energy facilities or aircraft-building factories face problems with vibration diagnostics and balancing. Russia needs such centers… as vibration has an ominous destructive power,” Mr. Bukhanchenko emphasized.

Vibration analyzers and balancing systems are necessary for timely detection of flaws in turbines and other mechanical engineering parts, as well as for the testing of new parts.

The TPU scientist pointed out that “Siberian hydropower stations have already expressed interest in the new Center.” He believes that “had the Sayano-Shushenskay Dam been able to use the services of such a Center, the tragedy could perhaps have been avoided.” (He referred to the catastrophic accident the hydropower plant on the River Yenisei in Siberia suffered on August 17, 2009; the emergency took 75 lives and left a lot of equipment damaged; experts later found in their formal report that “the accident was primarily caused by vibrations of turbine #2 which led to fatigue damage of the mountings of the turbine, including its cover”—Editor’s note)

The Nizhny Novgorod Region in the mid-Volga area plans to launch the inaugural stage of its first IT park this November, East-West Digital News, the first all English-language online resource dedicated to Russian digital industries, reported earlier this week, citing an announcement from the Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications that followed a top-level on-site inspection by the Ministry in late March.

The long-awaited $430m Ankudinovka IT Park is one of seven high-technology technoparks around the country mandated by a federal Cabinet decision in 2006.

The government program under which the parks have been funded expires later this year, and the selected regions and technopark residents they have attracted are expected to take over the projects themselves.

The Nizhny park will focus on developing information and telecommunications technologies; medical and biomedical technologies, including innovative cardiovascular disease and cancer therapies, obstetrics equipment, etc.; and technologies for instrument making, mechanical engineering, electronics, chemistry, and new materials.

According to the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Ministry of Investment Policy, Ankudinovka will become home to as many as 100 resident companies that are expected to create about 1,750 new local jobs as they develop. Regional officials hope innovative solutions that will make some high-tech imports redundant will account for up to 65% of the residents’ overall output. There will be enough social infrastructure in the park’s territory to ensure comfortable work and leisure, the local officials said.

Of the total investment required to kick-start the effort, only 3.1 billion rubles (about $88.5 million) will have come from federal and regional coffers, the regional Ministry said. The lion’s share is expected to be contributed by yet-unspecified private investors. The investment is projected to pay off in six years.

The ambitious Nizhny project broke ground in 2012 – much later than most of the other regions picked for the program – and already has a history of delays. In March 2013 the Russian business daily Kommersant reported that federal auditors had expressed “concern over the efficacy of the use of government money in Nizhny’s Ankudinovka.” Last summer government plans were to launch the technopark’s first business center “by the spring of 2014.” In September word came from Ankudinovka’s top management that the IT park would open even earlier – in December 2013. But in October CNews.ru broke the news that the $88m spent so far had brought negligible results and further funding had been “suspended.”

As of today, the only fully built facility in the Ankudinovka Technopark is a data center belonging to Sberbank, the national savings bank.

Sarov, one of Russia’s largest centers for nuclear research, is heading for diversification. The federal government is considering drawing upon the solid scientific ecosystem of the city, 460km east of Moscow, to create a major hub for IT and cyber security research.

A leading nuclear weapons design area in the USSR which did not appear on unclassified maps and was known only as “Arzamas-16” between 1946 and 1991, Sarov is now a city of 90,000 and home to a nuclear research entity known in the West as VNIIEF. Its achievements in the IT field were acknowledged by Nikolai Nikiforov, the minister of Telecom and Mass Communications, during a visit to the city in late March, reported East-West Digital News, the first all English-language online resource dedicated to Russian digital industries.

The foundation for Sarov’s renewed and enhanced IT capability will be the Sarov Technopark, which was set up to commercialize VNIIEF’s civilian research products through the creation of a number of multi-sector engineering companies.

This active R&D facility has developed competencies in cyber security; supercomputing and big data; automation and hardware-software complex development; laser technologies; alternative energy; new materials; new medical equipment; and power engineering.

Minister Nikiforov hopes to make VNIIEF and the technopark a hub capable of sending commercially viable solutions to customers around the world.

Scientists at Kazan Volga Federal University in Russia’s Tatarstan have developed a new method of making carbon nanotubes and polyolefin based compositions that help boost the strength and other physical-mechanical properties of polymers, the university announced in its press release.

As far back as last fall the developers from the university’s Nonorganic Chemistry Chair led by Rustem Amirov obtained a Russian patent for their invention.

Such polymers will be very useful in projects, for which utilizing metals with excessive strength properties is a disadvantage—for example, when trying to reduce the weight of parts for aircraft, motor vehicles or rockets. Such automotive giants as BMW and Renault are already considering taking advantage of the new polymer materials, the Kazan university emphasized.

The Tatarstan developers set an example, in which a car manufacturer added polymers to steel and aluminum when making the body of one of its experimental cars. The move is said to have enabled a 60% weight reduction while keeping a maximum possible strength.

Nobody has approached the Kazan scientists for talks over possible license purchase so far. “The initiative should come from a manufacturer, not from scientists,” Mr. Amirov believes.

Crocus Nano Electronics (CNE), the joint venture founded in 2011 by France’s Crocus Technology and Rusnano, Russia’s state-owned nanotech giant, has successfully completed the certification of its cleanroom in Moscow according to ISO 14644–1 requirements, the Rusnano website announced.

The cleanroom is certified as the state-of-the-art class 1,000 (ISO 6) in the production area. Now all set to accommodate cutting-edge equipment, the cleanroom is the heart of the first 300mm wafer fab in Russia, which will be capable of processing up to 1,000 wafers per week.

“Equipment hook-up is expected to occur in the next quarter and we expect to begin process qualification of our fab equipment in September, 2014,” said Mark Dydyk, the CEO of CNE.

Crocus Technology is a leading developer of magnetically enhanced semiconductor technologies.

Samara State Aerospace University (SSAU) in the mid-Volga area expects to receive more than a million dollars from the Russian government to cover R&D aimed at developing industrial smart systems to control a company’s resources on a real-time basis, the university announced.

The team behind the new project includes researchers from a university laboratory specifically set up to back the effort, and engineers from Reasonable Solutions, a local company.

“The R&D is expected to bring about new artificial intelligence technology called “multi-agent platform for adaptive planning.” It will control industrial resources on a real-time basis with minimal human involvement, thus helping cut overall costs,” SSAU emphasized in its press release.

The endeavor, estimated to cost a total of $2.3m, is kicking off next month, and the project owners are hoping to complete it within three years.

Earlier this week Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow, and California-based digital security solutions firm Symantec signed a deal for joint cooperation across a number of segments, reported East-West Digital News, the first all English-language online resource dedicated to Russian digital industries.

Cooperation will range from educational projects to cooperation in software development. In particular, Symantec will provide mentoring support and advice to companies participating at Skolkovo by helping them create innovative IT products.

“The development of an ecosystem that offers Skolkovo participants close contact with industry leading companies, scientific and technical experts, engineers and businessmen, access to sources, and the exchange of experience with colleagues from Russia, Europe, Asia and the USA is one of the most important activities of the Foundation,” Igor Bogachev, Executive Director of the IT Cluster at Skolkovo, stated in a press release.

In turn, Skolkovo will provide Symantec access to technologies and products from Russian innovators, offering the opportunity to use the resources of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skolkovo Tech).

Cooperation plans also include the organization of joint activities for the development of business contacts between associated partners and the involvement of new organizations at Skolkovo. The two entities are already involved in overseeing a competition of innovative projects in the field of information security, called iSecurity.

With the German economy already suffering (and AMD cutting its outlook), it appears Putin's promise to ensure Obama's action will see retaliation are starting to weigh as much on the rest of the world as Western media suggest US sanctions are weighing on Russia. This time, after blocking foreign cars and Intel/AMD chips, Bloomberg reports the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to require government agencies and state-run enterprises to give preference to local providers of software and hardware. For some context, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Germany’s SAP SE had combined revenue of 285 billion rubles ($8.1 billion) from Russia (with 77% coming from government and SOEs). “This all has to do with sanctions,” warned one Russian politician.

Sales companies resident business incubator seed stage of development for the I half 2014 amounted to more than 26 million rubles. Reported the press service of the Governor and the Government of the Nizhny Novgorod region.
Thus , annual target sales volume of resident companies for 6 months exceeded by 88%. For comparison, in 2013 this figure amounted to 7,000,000 rubles. Sales companies resident business incubator stage start-up for 6 months of this year amounted to more than 15 million rubles. It should also be noted , that at the moment a business incubator seed stage is 80%, and a business incubator stage startup - by 76%.

The first Russo-Chinese University, to be built in China, is expected to open for students in 2016, Russia Today reported.

Moscow Lomonosov State University (MSU) will reportedly provide a scientific basis for the new institution, while Beijing Polytechnic will act as the main Chinese partner in the effort.

The university will be built in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. According to Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the prime mouthpiece for the Russian government, the Chinese partners have assumed the full cost of building and managing the project.

Training will be offered in three languages, including Russian, Chinese and English. The new educational institution is meant for Russian and Chinese students, who will then be able to take on-the-job training at sizable corporations in both countries.

The Russo-Chinese University will start by focusing on the Russian language and Russian literature, culture and art, as well as information technology, applied mathematics, economics, international commerce, law, and finance. It is then expected to add to the list applied chemistry, physics, healthcare, space research, mechanical engineering, transport systems, and logistics.

Semyon Shkarupo, a student of Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radio Electronics (TUSUR) in Siberia, has come up with a new battery charging system for electrical vehicles, such as electrical cars and bikes, which is expected to enable much faster charging than we have today.