Ilc reference design and challenges

The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a 500 GeV center- of-mass electron-positron linear collider based on 1.3 GHz superconducting rf. For the past two years, the ILC design has been developed by an international collaboration, the Global Design Effort. A draft Reference Design Report (RDR) for the ILC was released in February 2007 and, after international review, the final draft will be published in mid-July, 2007. This talk will describe the ILC design along with the outstanding R&D and engineering challenges. The next step is to complete an Engineering Design (EDR) by 2010, and plans for this phase will also be discussed.