Texas semiconductor company Silicon Labs has become the first private firm to be a founding partner of a smart city living lab project in India.

The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH) set up the smart city project to provide a research and development ecosystem for technologies designed to improve safety, sustainability, energy efficiency, sanitation and overall quality of life in densifying cities.

The labs, part of IIITH’s Smart City Research Center, is supported by the Indian government’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Smart Cities Mission, the government of Telangana, European Business & Technology Centre (EBTC), and Amsterdam Innovation Arena.

“This unique private, public and academia will catalyse the nation’s goal in enabling 100 smart cities in the next five years,” said Ajai Garg, senior director at MeitY. “The complementary skills and knowledge that Silicon Labs and the living lab have will help future-proof our cities of tomorrow.”

Manish Kothari, vice president of Silicon Labs in India, added: “Silicon Labs is honoured to be the first corporate founding partner for IIITH’s smart city living lab. Our mission is to make the world a better place leveraging the power of IoT. As a widely recognised and respected leader in designing silicon and software for a wide range of smart city applications, we are happy to share our expertise within the innovation ecosystem being created at the smart city living labs.”

While private companies such as Silicon Labs focus on addressing market needs, academia will focus on building new knowledge through research and imparting education. The combination is expected to yield accelerated development of breakthroughs.

“Collaboration between industry and academia is key to fuel innovation and growth in technology,” said Ramesh Loganathan, head of research at IIITH. “Silicon Labs’ expertise in designing compelling wireless devices will enhance our efforts of building an innovation ecosystem for smart cities.”

The lab is part in the Indian government’s smart cities mission, an initiative to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local development and harnessing technology to create smart outcomes for citizens. In this project, 100 cities are being covered for the duration of five years with budget of Rs100 crore per city per year.

“We are very happy to have Silicon Labs as one of the corporate founding partners in the lab,” said Vincent van Noord, director at European Business & Technology Centre. “They are the perfect examples of an organisation that underlines the essence of our being. The focus for Silicon Labs is to work, develop and test products together with like-minded counterparts which can then be demonstrated and showcased in the lab. Very much looking forward to this partnership.”

Hyderabad is the home of Silicon Labs’ newest and fastest-growing wireless development centre. The company continues to hire hardware and software engineers to establish a world-class development centre for wireless connectivity. The goal is to establish its Hyderabad site as the region’s top design centre for wireless connectivity.