Innovation award in nanoelectronics and digital technology.

Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, is to receive the 2025 imec Innovation Award*. The award recognises Srouji’s pivotal role in shaping Apple’s technology roadmap through his leadership in the development of Apple silicon. In doing so, he has not only redefined Apple’s products, but has also had a major impact on the broader semiconductor ecosystem, spurring the advancement of chip technology that elevates features, experiences, and AI to new heights. Johny Srouji will receive the imec Innovation Award at the ITF World conference in Antwerp (b) next May.

Since joining Apple in 2008 to lead the development of the A4 chip – the company’s first in-house designed system on a chip (SoC) – Johny Srouji has built and led a world-class team of engineers driving innovation across Apple’s hardware technologies. Their work has fueled major advancements in Apple silicon, batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays, and other critical components that define Apple’s product lineup.

After consistently leading the smartphone market with SoC designs prioritizing performance per watt, Srouji and his team brought their scalable architecture to the Mac, offering faster performance, enhanced capabilities, and category-leading battery life. Earlier this year, Apple launched C1, its first ever cellular modem system delivering excellent 5G and satellite connectivity while being far more energy efficient. Across all these innovations and more, the discipline to create and maintain a scalable architecture has yielded enormous benefits, and Apple’s chip designs are driving new strategies in the industry.

“As artificial intelligence integrates into nearly every aspect of modern technology – from personal planning tools to digital assistants – the demand for high-performance, energy-efficient and battery-powered hardware such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and smartwatches has never been greater. Meeting this demand requires advanced semiconductor technologies and architectures that deliver superior performance while minimizing power consumption. Johny’s vision in leveraging deeply scaled semiconductor technology to achieve this is driving the next wave of chip architectures that will revolutionize consumer electronics and edge computing. For these contributions, Johny Srouji is a deserving recipient of this year’s Innovation Award,” said Luc Van den hove, CEO of imec. “It is a great honor to be recognized by imec and receive its most prestigious Innovation Award, which I humbly share with my colleagues at Apple,” said Johny Srouji. "Our goal is always to create differentiated technologies to enable the world’s best products. Creating and incorporating bleeding-edge advancements while maintaining our intense focus on power efficient performance, we look forward to solving hard problems and unlocking new possibilities through our continued partnership with imec and collaboration across the industry."

Before joining Apple, Johny Srouji held senior positions at Intel and IBM, where he contributed to processor development and design.

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*Since its launch in 2016, the imec Innovation Award has become a prestigious recognition for pioneers in the semiconductor industry. 

@imec_int @Apple @MarcomWittig #AI #Automation #Computers

Tackling AI’s compute memory bottleneck.

To deliver major advancements for the tech industry and enabling highly tangible applications for consumers in the near future.

LtoR: Cofounders Sebastien Couet, CTO,
Sylvain Dubois, CEO.

Vertical Compute founded by CEO Sylvain Dubois (ex-Google) and CTO Sebastien Couet (ex-imec), has successfully closed a seed investment round of €20 million. The round was led by imec.xpand and supported by a strong investor base including Eurazeo, XAnge, Vector Gestion and imec. The funding will support Vertical Compute’s ambition to develop a novel vertical integrated memory and compute technology, unlocking a new generation of AI applications.

Unlocking the future of AI with Verticality.
Vertical Compute’s technology will have a transformative impact, enabling next-generation applications with unparalleled efficiency and privacy. By minimising data movement and bringing large data closer to computation, the innovation ensures energy savings of up to 80%, unlocks hyper-personalised AI solutions, and eliminates the need for remote data transfers, protecting user privacy.

“Memory technologies face limitations in both density and performance scaling, while processor performance continues to surge. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge, making it imperative to overcome the memory wall to enable the next wave of AI innovations. We believe going Vertical is the path to 100X gains”, says Sébastien Couet, CTO of Vertical Compute.

Tackling the Memory Wall.
The rapid advancements in large language models and generative AI are transforming virtually all industries at an unprecedented pace. However, these large-scale AI models still heavily rely on complex cloud infrastructure and high bandwidth memories, leading to data transfer latency, high energy consumption and sending sensitive data to distant servers. Edge computing can address these issues, but inferencing large AI models on smartphones, PCs or smart home devices faces significant cost, power and scalability constraints. The big underlying problem is the ‘memory wall’. Static Random Access Memory (SRAM), integrated as caches of the CPU or GPU, is fast but very small and expensive. Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM), the main memory of compute systems, is larger but expensive and energy-consuming. The scaling of both memory technologies in density and performance is slowing down while processor speeds and market needs keep increasing, causing a significant bottleneck. This problem is rapidly escalating due to the surging demand for AI workloads, requiring vast amounts of data to be accessed quickly. Overcoming this memory wall is crucial for advancing AI inference

Innovating with Vertical Compute’s Chiplet Technology.
Vertical Compute is headquartered in Louvain-La-Neuve (BE), with its main R&D offices in Leuven (BE), Grenoble (FR) and Nice (FR). The company is recruiting an elite team of engineers to support its ambitious R&D goals and accelerate the development and commercialization of its chiplet-based technology.

 “We want to recruit the very best from all over Europe, and finally put Europe at the forefront in terms of tech”, adds Sylvain Dubois. 

"This seed investment round highlights the confidence in the leadership team's capabilities and the disruptive potential of this game-changing technology. We could not be more excited to collaborate with Sylvain, Sebastien and their team and to help them to achieve their ambitious goals”, says Tom Vanhoutte from imec.xpand. 

"We are confident that, with the ongoing support of our teams and ecosystem, Vertical Compute can become a disruptor in the semiconductor industry. The strong international investor base shows that we are not alone in this belief”, says Patrick Vandenameele, co-Chief Operating Officer at imec.

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@imec_int #AI #VerticalCompute

A thousand times brighter.

A perovskite LED stack, emitting light thousand times brighter than state-of-the-art OLEDs has been presented by Imec. This result, published in this month’s Nature Photonics*, is a pivotal milestone towards a perovskite injection laser, promising exciting applications in image projection, environmental sensing, medical diagnostics, and beyond.

Transparent perovskite light emitting diodes on sapphire substrate with scaled emission area for injection of ultrahigh current densities.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have revolutionized modern lighting and sensing technology. From applications in our homes to industry, LEDs are used for all lighting applications, from indoor lighting over TV screens to biomedicine. Widely used organic LEDs (OLEDs) today, for example in smartphone screens, employ organic thin-film materials as a semiconductor. However, their maximum brightness remains limited; just think of trying to read your smartphone screen on a very sunny day. Meanwhile, perovskites – a class of materials with a specific crystal structure – are proving their worth beyond solar cells. With excellent optoelectrical properties, low-cost processability and efficient charge transport, these materials have emerged in the last ten years as interesting candidates for light emission applications, such as LEDs.

However, while perovskites can withstand very high current densities, laser operation with the emission of high-intensity coherent light has not been reached yet. “In the ULTRA-LUX project, imec showed for the first time a PeLED architecture with low optical losses and pumped these PeLEDs to current densities that support the stimulated emission of light”, explained Prof. Paul Heremans, who is an imec Senior Fellow and Principal Investigator of the project. “This novel architecture of transport layers, transparent electrodes and perovskite as the semiconductor active material, can operate at electrical current densities tens of thousands of times higher (3 kA cm-2) than conventional OLEDs can.”

“With this architecture, imec enhanced amplified spontaneous emission, with an electrical assist of the conventional optical pumping. By doing so, imec demonstrated that electrical injection contributes 13 percent to the total amount of stimulated emission and thus approaches the threshold to achieve a thin film injection laser”, stated Robert Gehlhaar, imec project manager. “Reaching this landmark milestone towards high-power thin-film laser diodes is paving the way to exciting new applications of thin-film perovskite lasers.”

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* The findings are published in the January 2024 edition of NaturePhotonics ‘Electrically Assisted Amplified Spontaneous Emission in Perovskite Light Emitting Diodes’. The ULTRA-LUX project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No.835133) with an Advanced Grant to Prof. Paul Heremans and is ongoing until September 30th, 2024.

@imec_int @NaturePhotonics #LED

Potential of thin-film sensors in infrared imaging.

Thin-film pinned photodiode integrated into superior short-wave-infrared imaging sensors.

The successful integration of a pinned photodiode structure in thin-film image sensors has been presented by Imec^*. With the addition of a pinned-photogate and a transfer gate, the superior absorption qualities of thin-film imagers -beyond one µm wavelength- can finally be exploited, unlocking the potential of sensing light beyond the visible in a cost-efficient way. Detecting wavelengths beyond visible light, for instance infrared light, offers clear advantages. Applications include cameras in autonomous vehicles to ‘see’ through smoke or fog and cameras to unlock your smartphone via face recognition. Whilst visible light can be detected via silicon-based imagers, other semiconductors are necessary for longer wavelengths, such as short-wave infrared (SWIR).

Pawel Malinowski, imec Program Manager ‘Pixel Innovations’ adds: “At imec, we are at the forefront of bridging the worlds of infrared and imagers, thanks to our combined expertise in thin-film photodiodes, IGZO, image sensors and thin-film transistors. By achieving this milestone, we surpassed current pixel architectural limitations and demonstrated a way to combine the best performing quantum-dot SWIR pixel with affordable manufacturing. Future steps include optimization of this technology in diverse types of thin-film photodiodes, as well as broadening its application in sensors beyond silicon imaging. We are looking forward to further these innovations in collaborations with industry partners.”

Use of III-V materials can overcome this detection limitation. However, manufacturing these absorbers is expensive, limiting their use. In contrast, sensors using thin-film absorbers (such as quantum dots) have recently emerged as a promising alternative. They have superior absorption characteristics and potential for integration with conventional (CMOS) readout circuits. Nonetheless, such infrared sensors have an inferior noise performance, which leads to poorer image quality.

Already in the 1980’s, the pinned photodiode (PPD) structure was introduced for silicon-CMOS image sensors. This structure introduces an additional transistor gate and a special photodetector structure, by which the charges can be completely drained before integration begins (allowing reset operation without kTC noise nor the effect of the previous frame). Consequently, because of lower noise and improved power performance, PPDs dominate the consumer market for silicon-based image sensors. Beyond silicon imaging, incorporating this structure was not possible up until now because of the difficulty of hybridizing two different semiconductor systems.

Now, imec demonstrates successful incorporation of a PPD structure in the readout circuit of thin-film-based image sensors; the first of its kind. A SWIR quantum-dot photodetector was monolithically hybridized with an indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO)-based thin-film transistor into a PPD pixel. This array was subsequently processed on a CMOS readout circuit to form a superior thin-film SWIR image sensor. “The prototype 4T image sensor showed a remarkable low read-out noise of 6.1e-, compared to >100e- for the conventional 3T sensor, demonstrating its superior noise performance” stated Nikolas Papadopoulos, project leader ‘Thin-Film Pinned Photodiode’ at imec. As a result, infrared images can be captured with less noise, distortion or interference, and more accuracy and detail.

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*The findings are published in the August 2023 edition of NatureElectronics ‘Pinned photodiode for monolithic thin-film image sensors’. Initial results were presented at the 2023 edition of the International Image Sensors Workshop.

@imec_int @NatureElectron #ThinFilm #InfraRed

How many were there!

In recent months we have become used to pictures of crowds not adhering to the new distancing protocols and putting their and others in danger. But how can one measure just how large a group gathering is? CrowdScan, a spin-off from imec and the University of Antwerp (B), has developed a system that measures the density of a crowd in real-time using a wireless sensor network.

Based on six years of research, CrowdScan has developed a system to measure crowd densities without using camera images, mobile phone data or other privacy-sensitive information. By transmitting low-energetic radio waves (868 MHz), CrowdScan measures the average signal attenuation of a wireless sensor network relative to the empty environment.

The technology was validated at different large-scale events such as Tomorrowland. When the coronavirus crisis broke out, CrowdScan immediately realized the added value of the technology for helping society adapt to the new needs of social distancing. The business model was extended from services for event organizers to services for local governments and cities. In May, a successful pilot project was launched to measure the size of groups on a bridge and a street near the MAS museum in Antwerp.

"There will be no mass events this summer, but the importance of accurate information on crowd densities has only increased since the coronavirus crisis", says Ben Bellekens, CEO of CrowdScan. “By providing police and emergency services with accurate information on crowd densities, they can make fast, objective decisions. This can help cities guarantee social distancing at places where population density is high, like city streets, public events, or parks. CrowdScan also aims to make an online ‘crowd barometer’, to show population density at specific places”.

“We are proud to enable the creation of this spin-off together with the University of Antwerp”, says Jo De Boeck, CSO at imec. "Recently, the innovative technology has been optimized for use cases with high market potential and a noble social purpose. For example, CrowdScan now offers a concrete solution to the new challenges that cities are facing today. With the support of the imec.istart acceleration program, the commercialization of this technology will accelerate in the coming months."

"In Antwerp's innovation ecosystem for metropolitanism and smart city, our university is focusing more than ever on value creation from research. To do this, we collaborate with the city government, local businesses and citizens. Open innovation hubs such as The Beacon facilitate this process by bringing people together and actively setting up projects that effectively benefit partners. That's how CrowdScan grew into a startup that, due to the coronavirus crisis, became more relevant than ever", says Silvia Lenaerts, Vice Rector Valorization & Development of the University of Antwerp. "This spin-off is a textbook example of how scientific research from the Faculty of Applied Engineering Sciences can actually generate an impact on society. As an entrepreneurial university, together with the City of Antwerp and imec, we have every reason to be proud".

 @imec_int @UAntwerpen #Safety #Belgium

Displays for augmented reality (AR) glasses.

MICLEDI Microdisplays, an imec spin-off, has raised €4,5M seed capital from imec.xpand, with participation of PMV and FIDIMEC. The funding will be used to develop microLED displays for next generation Augmented Reality (AR) glasses.

MICLEDI’s vision is to enable AR for everyday personal use - smart glasses that are small, lightweight, with long battery life, and at reasonable cost. To make this happen, MICLEDI is developing the world smallest and brightest displays. The key innovation behind MICLEDI is the new integration technology for microLED on 300mm wafers developed in collaboration with imec.

L-r: Dr. Soeren Steudel, co-founder and CTO; Dr. Alexander Mityashin, co-founder and COO; Seán Lord, CEO

MICLEDI Microdisplays was founded by Dr. Soeren Steudel and Dr. Alexander Mityashin, both researchers from imec with a deep know-how in the R&D field and display development. They are joined by Seán Lord, an experienced executive in the semiconductor industry, as CEO.

“AR glasses may replace our smartphones in the future and display technology is a key enabler for such a transition. Today’s display technologies cannot fulfil the specifications needed for next generation AR glasses. At MICLEDI we are tackling this challenge and have developed displays that are 100x brighter than commercial alternatives” - explains Soeren Steudel, co-founder of MICLEDI.

In order to implement the vision that future consumer AR devices will be powered by a tiny display developed in Leuven, the company has raised a 4.5M euro seed investment from imec.xpand, PMV, and FIDIMEC.

“We are pleased to back a unique team. We look forward to working with them and to enable technology that will be at the core of future AR devices and will change how digital information is presented to consumers” – says Cyril Vančura, Partner at imec.xpand.

MICLEDI’s will develop its microLED technology and first prototypes on imec’s 300mm pilot-line infrastructure.

“Hardware development takes courage, capital and time. We are proud of the entrepreneurship of our engineers to bring promising technology developments originating from our R&D, to the market” says Luc Van den hove, president and CEO at imec. “Based on an original concept launched, now more than 2 years ago, by the MICLEDI team, imec together with imec.xpand incubated this into a promising technology base and exciting business case. It leverages imecs extensive R&D in organic displays, 300mm integration and wafer-scale optics technologies.”

“MICLEDI’s new generation displays for AR glasses fits in PMV’s strategy of supporting early stage technology with a largescale international potential, hence strengthening Flander’s position as a top region.” – Roald Borré, Head of Equity Investments at PMV.

#Research @imec_int

European grant aid awarded for microscopy development.

Imec has announced that Niels Verellen, one of its young scientists, has been awarded an ERC* Starting Grant. The grant of 1.5 million euros (for 5 years) will be used to enable high-resolution, fast, robust, zero-maintenance, inexpensive and ultra-compact microscopy technology based on on-chip photonics and CMOS image sensors. The technology paves the way for multiple applications of cell imaging in life sciences, biology, and medicine and compact, cost-effective DNA sequencing instruments.

Niels Verellen, who is Senior Photonics Researcher & project leader at imec ays : “Compact, high-resolution and high-throughput microscopy devices will induce a profound change in the way cell biologists do research, in the way DNA sequencing becomes more and more accessible, in the way certain diseases can be diagnosed, new drugs are screened in the pharma industry, and healthcare workers can diagnose patients in remote areas.”

Microscopy is an indispensable tool in biology and medicine that has fueled many breakthroughs. Recently the world of microscopy has witnessed a true revolution in terms of increased resolution of fluorescent imaging techniques, including a Nobel Prize in 2014. Yet, these techniques remain largely locked-up in specialized laboratories as they require bulky, expensive instrumentation and highly skilled operators.

The next big push in microscopy with a large societal impact will come from extremely compact and robust optical systems that will make high-resolution microscopy highly accessible and as such facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of diseases or disorders caused by problems at the cell or molecular level, such as meningitis, malaria, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, it will pave the way to DNA analysis as a more standard procedure, not only for the diagnosis of genomic disorders or in forensics, but also in cancer treatment, follow-up of transplants, the microbiome, pre-natal tests, and even agriculture, and archeology.

The topic of Verellen’s ERC grant is the development of Integrated high-Resolution On-Chip Structured Illumination Microscopy (IROCSIM). This new technology is based on a novel imaging platform that integrates active on-chip photonics and CMOS image sensors. “Whereas existing microscopy techniques today suffer from a trade-off between equipment size, field-of-view, and resolution, the IROCSIM solution will eliminate the need for bulky optical components and enable microscopy in the smallest possible form-factor, with a scalable field-of-view and without compromising the resolution,” continues Verellen.

Jo De Boeck, imec’s CTO says: “We are very proud that young researchers such as Niels Verellen are awarded an ERC Starting Grant and as such get a unique opportunity to fulfill their ambitions and creative ideas in research. At imec, we select and foster our young scientists and provide them with a world-class infrastructure. These ERC Starting Grants show that their work indeed meets the highest standards.”

* The European Research Council (ERC) is a pan European funding body designed to support investigator-driven frontier research and stimulate scientific excellence across Europe. The ERC aims to support the best and most creative scientists to identify and explore new opportunities and directions in any field of research. ERC Starting grants in particular are designed to support outstanding researchers with 2 to 7 years postdoctoral experience.

@imec_int #PHarma  @ERC_Research

Lifetime of innovation recognised!

Imec, the research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, today presented its annual Lifetime of Innovation Award to Dr. Irwin Jacobs, Founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Qualcomm. The annual industry honor is presented to the individual who has significantly advanced the field of semiconductor technology. The formal presentation will be made at the global Imec Technology Forum (ITF) in May in Belgium.

Dr Irwin M. Jacobs

In making the announcement, Luc Van den hove, president and CEO of imec, said: “Irwin Jacobs’ many technological contributions laid the groundwork for creating the mobile industry and markets that we know today. Under his leadership, Qualcomm developed two-way mobile satellite communications and tracking systems deemed the most advanced in the world. He pioneered spread-spectrum technology and systems using CDMA (code division multiple access), which became a digital standard for cellular phone communications. Together, these technologies opened mobile communications to the global consumer market.”

Irwin Jacobs began his career first as an assistant and then associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT and, later, as professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California in San Diego. While at MIT, he co-authored Principles of Communication Engineering, a textbook still in use. He began his corporate life as a cofounder of Linkabit, which developed satellite encryption devices. In 1985, he co-founded Qualcomm, serving as CEO until 2005 and chairman through 2009. His numerous awards include the National Medal of Technology, the Marconi Prize, and the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. His honors include nine honorary degrees including doctor of engineering from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.

Imec initiated the Lifetime of Innovation Award in 2015 at their annual global forum known as ITF (Imec Technology Forum). The award marks milestones that have transformed the semiconductor industry. The first recipient was Dr. Morris Chang, whose foundry model launched the fabless semiconductor industry, spurring creation of new innovative companies. In 2016, Gordon Moore was honored, creator of the famous Moore’s law theory and co-founder of Intel. Dr. Kinam Kim was honored in 2017 for his contributions in memory technologies and his visionary leadership at Samsung.

Luc Van den hove concluded, saying: “Our mission is to create innovation through collaboration. By gathering global technology leaders at the ITF, imec provides an open forum to share issues and trends challenging the semiconductor industry. In this international exchange, imec and participants outline ways to collaborate in bringing innovative solutions to market.”

@imec_int #PAuto 

System testing of advanced 3D chips wins award.

Imec has announced the successful development of a fully-automatic system for pre-bond testing of advanced 3D chips. Pre-bond testing is important to increase the yield of 3D stacked chips. The new system enables probing and hence testing of chips with large arrays of 40µm-pitch micro-bumps, on 300mm wafers. The relevance of this new tool is underlined by winning the 2017 National Instruments Engineering Impact Award at a ceremony in Austin (TX USA)

The test system as installed in imec’s Fab-2

As an emerging technology, 3D IC stacking still has many open options and technical challenges. One of these challenges is probing of the individual chips, before being stacked, to ensure a good yield of the 3D stacked ICs. The inter-chip connections of 3D stacked ICs are made by large arrays of fine-pitch micro-bumps which makes probing these bumps a challenge. Until today, the probing solution is to add dedicated pre-bond probe pads to the to-be-stacked dies, but this requires extra space and design effort and increases test time.

Imec and Cascade Microtech have now developed a fully automatic test cell that can provide test access by probing large arrays of fine-pitch micro-bumps. The system is based on a Cascade Microtech CM300 probe station and National Instruments PXI test instrumentation, complemented by in-house developed software for automatic test generation, data analysis, and visualization. The system allows testing of wafers up to 300mm diameter, including thinned wafers on tape frame with exposed through-silicon vias. After several years of intense collaboration between imec and Cascade Microtech, partly supported by the EU-funded FP7 SEA4KET project, good results were achieved with Cascade Microtech’s Pyramid Probe® prototype RBI probe cards on imec’s 300mm wafers with 40µm-pitch micro-bumped chips.

--> At the heart of the test system is this probe core with MEMS-based probe tips that contact the large arrays of fine-pitch micro-bumps.  “Imec provided us with unique early insights into the test requirements for 3D ICs, which drove the development of this system,” said Jörg Kiesewetter, director of engineering at Cascade Microtech Dresden (D). “Also the availability of imec’s dedicated micro-bump test wafers has helped us to fine-tune both the probe station and the probe cards for this application.”

“At imec, we are using the system now on a routine basis to test our 40µm-pitch micro-bumped wafers,” stated Erik Jan Marinissen, principal scientist at imec. “As everything in the semiconductor realm, also micro-bumps are subject to downscaling. Hence, with Cascade, we have started experiments to also probe our 20µm-pitch micro-bump arrays, and those look promising.”

@imec_int #NIweek @FormFactorInc #TandM

Thin-Film solar cells research grant!

imec the nanoelectronics research centre and Hasselt University, have announced that one of their scientists has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The grantee is Bart Vermang, researcher at IMOMEC, imec’s associated lab at the Hasselt University.

Bart Vermang

He receives two million euro to apply techniques from silicon solar cell processing to revolutionize the design of thin-film solar cells, improving their efficiency, cost and stability. With these 5-year ERC Starting Grants, the European Research Council wants to back young and promising researchers, giving them a perspective to pursue ambitious fundamental research that may lead to breakthroughs, and encouraging them to pursue a career in research and set up their own labs and teams.

Bart Vermang’s field of study is thin-film solar technology, more specifically CIGS(e) solar cells. These combine flexible use with high efficiency, but they still have stability and reliability issues. Vermang proposes to revolutionize the design of CIGS(e) solar cells by implementing advanced surface techniques, introducing structures and layers also used in silicon solar technology. This includes adding innovative nanostructures to capture more light into the cell’s active layers. Other new techniques he envisages are inversion layer emitters, passivated contacts and surface passivation layers, which will make energy generation more efficient by avoiding that charge carriers recombine. In combination, these new techniques should lead to cells with conversion efficiencies between 23 and 26% with an improved stability and reliability.

One of the main applications of thin-film solar cells will be building-integrated energy generation, where solar technology will be an integral part of building elements such as window panes, facade elements in all shapes, or curved roof covering. This is a key technology for Europe as regulations will require new buildings to become near energy neutral by 2020. The results of this research should directly lead to more efficient and long-lasting PV technology for buildings, and will thus contribute to reaching Europe’s ambitious climate goals.

Veronique de Halleux, Manager Public Funding at imec, comments: “With these Starting Grants, the European Research Council provides attractive long-term funding to excellent investigators to do groundbreaking research. This grant and the previous ones we were awarded show that imec is an excellent place to pursue such research, with the best infrastructure available and the pooled experience of our teams, many world-leading in their field. We therefore congratulate Bart Vermang and expect that his research will inspire other researchers at imec and elsewhere to set up ambitious research projects”.

@imec_int #PAuto #ThinFilm 

Grant for Thin Film research.

World-leading nanoelectronics research centre imec announces that Kris Myny, one of its young scientists, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The grant of 1.5 million euros is earmarked to open up new research horizons in the field of thin-film transistor technology. This will allow a leap forward compared to current state-of-the-art and enable breakthrough applications in e.g. healthcare and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). ERC Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to support excellent researchers at the stage at which they are starting their own independent research team after a stringent selection procedure; they are among the most prestigious of European research grants.

With his research, Kris Myny wants to realize a breakthrough in thin-film transistor technology, a technology used to create the large-area, flexible circuits that e.g. drive today’s flat-panel displays.
Specifically, he wants to introduce design innovations of unipolar n-type transistor circuits based on amorphous Indium-Gallium-Zinc-Oxide (a-IGZO) as semiconductor. These are currently acknowledged as the most promising transistors for next-generation curved, flexible, or even rollable electronic applications.

Kris Myny

“My goal is to use these transistors to introduce a new logic family for building digital circuits that will drastically decrease the power consumption compared to current flexible circuits. And this of course without compromising the speed of the electronics. At the same time, we will also make the transistors smaller, in a way that is compatible with large-area manufacturing. In addition, I will also look at new techniques to design ultralow-power systems in the new logic style. These will allow building next-generation large-area flexible applications such as displays, IoT sensors, or wearable healthcare sensor patches.”

In a recent press release, the European Commission announced that in 2017 it would invest a record 1.8 billion in its ERC grant scheme. A sizable part of the budget is earmarked for Starting Grants, reserved for young scientists with two to seven years of post-PhD experience. Jo De Boeck, imec’s CTO says “We congratulate Kris Myny for all his valuable research culminating in this grant. Imec goes to great lengths to select and foster our young scientists and provide them with a world-class infrastructure. These ERC Starting Grants show that their work indeed meets the highest standards, comparable to any in Europe.”

@imec_int #thinfilm #Pauto

Prestigious European Research Council grant to help survival of cancer patients! #Medicine #Research

Imec has announced that Prof. Dr. Liesbet Lagae, R&D Manager Life Science Technologies at imec and professor in Nanobio Physics at KU Leuven (B), has been awarded a Consolidator Grant for her research project SCALPEL* by the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC grant is the most prestigious grant for top researchers in the European Union. The grant funding, with a budget of 2 MEuro and for the duration of 5 years, will lead to the development of a high-content, high-throughput cell imaging and sorting device, that is more compact and easier to use than any existing single cell analyzer. The new device should support the work of pathologists, surgeons, and nurses and aims to improve the individualized follow-up and survival rate of cancer patients.

The single cell analyzer that Prof. Dr. Lagae and her team will develop for the SCALPEL project is based on lens free digital imaging to analyze the physical morphology of single cells flowing at high speeds through a microfluidic network with gentle cell sorting switches to route the cells towards different outlets. It thus combines the virtues of microscopic 'high content' imaging with the virtues of automated 'high throughput' single cell analysis and sorting at a fraction of the cost. Because all optomechanical components, such as lenses, detectors, and nozzles, are replaced by nanoelectronics and advanced signal processing technology, the devices will be cheap and compact.

Currently, single cell analysis remains tedious with many different instruments and protocols, typically taking a few days of intense, hands-on work. The process not only slows down research, but also hinders the translation to application in clinical practice. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to cure primary tumors, but very little was spent in trying to detect or kill circulating tumor cells causing metastasis. Metastasis is responsible for more than 90 percent of cancer-related deaths, and originates from single circulating tumor cells, spreading via the blood stream to seed new tumors. Detection of those highly aggressive circulating tumor cells at an early stage would greatly improve the chance of survival. This is an example of an application that could greatly benefit from the 'SCALPEL' cell sorter. Prof. Lagae will collaborate with Prof. Deniz Wirtz from John's Hopkins INBT and Prof. Johan Swinnen from KU Leuven's dept. of oncology for showing the potential of the device in metastasis detection.

ERC is a flagship component of the 'Ideas Programme' of the European Union's Seventh Research Framework Program (FP7). Through open competition it awards grants to projects led by top researchers in Europe. With scientific excellence being the sole criterion for selection, the ERC's aim is to recognize the best ideas, and retain and confer status and visibility to the best brains in Europe, while also attracting talent from abroad. By challenging Europe's brightest minds, the ERC expects that its grants will help to bring about new and unpredictable scientific and technological discoveries'the kind that can form the basis of new industries, markets, and broader social innovations of the future.


*SCALPEL: Single Cell AnaLysis and Sorting Platform based on Lensfree digital imaging applied to Rapid Cancer Detection

Collaborate in ExaScience Life Lab in Belgium

Lab will allow development of even more powerful supercomputers for life sciences research

Intel, imec and five Flemish universities (UA, UGhent, KULeuven, UHasselt, VUB) announced the planned foundation of the ExaScience Life Lab on the imec campus in Leuven, with which Janssen Pharmaceutica will collaborate in the future. The ExaScience Life Lab will combine Intel’s supercomputing expertise with Flanders’ extensive expertise in life sciences and biotechnology. The objective of the collaboration is to create new supercomputer solutions and generate breakthroughs in life sciences and biotechnology.

High performance computing can lead to new insights and breakthroughs in life sciences and biotechnology. As a result, the use of supercomputers will become as strategically vital as lab research. In the development of medical supercomputers, close collaboration with specialists in the field is becoming ever more important since this allows the additional computing power to be utilised to maximum advantage. That is why Intel, Janssen Pharmaceutica, imec and five Flemish universities have decided to join forces. During the coming months, Intel, Janssen Pharmaceutica, imec and the Flemish Universities will negotiate in good faith to establish the appropriate agreements in such respect.

The ExaScience Life Lab aims to boost research in the life sciences. Initially, the lab will focus on two fields of application. First, the lab will examine how supercomputers can accelerate the processing of entire genome sequences. Today, such an analysis takes approximately 48 hours, and with the expected explosion of genome data becoming available in the coming years, it is crucial to improve the efficiency of the computing process. A second application area of the ExaScience Life Lab will be to examine the use of computer simulations in the life sciences. Testing hypotheses through computer simulation both cells and tissues instead of through wet-lab testing saves considerable amounts of time and cost associated to lab tests.

The ExaScience Life Lab is conceived as an extension of Intel’s ExaScience Lab for High Performance Computing opened at imec in 2010.

“Intel has an extensive network of research laboratories in Europe. Once operational, the ExaScience Life Lab will be our European centre of excellence for high performance computing in the life sciences”, says Intel lab manager Luc Provoost. “The intended collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceuticals should enable us to build even more powerful supercomputers. We expect the lab’s joint research and development efforts to lead to major breakthroughs in the use of supercomputing for bioscientific applications.”

“It is our conviction that the ExaScience Life Lab will act as a catalyst in our aspiration to solve certain critical medical needs through technological innovation”, stated Gunaretnam Rajagopal, Janssen Pharmaceutica’ Head of computational sciences. “In the future, supercomputing will become a key force behind advances in life sciences.”

Flemish Minister of Innovation Ingrid Lieten pointed out that “Flanders enjoys an enviable reputation in the fields of life sciences, biotechnology and high performance computing, with a research-driven industry and highly skilled knowledge workers. The ExaScience Life Lab will stimulate collaboration between various disciplines and between the academic and the corporate world. It will establish Flanders as a leading region for supercomputing in life sciences. To achieve this, the ExaScience Life Lab will work closely with the Flemish Supercomputer Centre.”

Luc Van den Hove, President and CEO at imec, stated that “We are very excited about this unique collaboration with leading international companies such as Intel and Janssen Pharmaceutica, and with the Flemish universities. I have every confidence that by pooling our resources and expertise, the ExaScience Life Lab will achieve excellent results that will stimulate research and development in the life sciences. I would like to thank the Flemish government and IWT for their financial support to the ExaScience Life Lab. And I am looking forward to a productive and strategic long-term collaboration.”

Collaboration in silicon-based power devices and LEDs.

The Nanoelectronics research centre imec and Veeco Instruments are collaborating on a project aimed at lowering the cost of producing gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) -based power devices and LEDs.

Barun Dutta, imec’s Chief Scientist, commented, “The productivity, repeatability, uniformity and crystal quality of Veeco’s metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) equipment has been instrumental in helping us meet our development milestones on GaN-on-Si for power and LED applications. The device performance enabled by the epi has helped us realize state-of-the-art D-mode (depletion mode) and E-mode (enhancement mode) power devices. Our goal is to establish an entire manufacturing infrastructure that allows GaN-on-Si to be a competitive technology.”

Imec's multi-partner GaN-on-Si research and development program gathers the industry to jointly develop world-class GaN LED and power devices on 200 mm silicon substrates compatible with a 200 mm CMOS-compatible infrastructure. By joining forces at imec, companies share costs, talent and intellectual property to develop advanced technologies and bring them to the market faster.

Jim Jenson, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Veeco MOCVD, commented, “We have been working with imec on this program since 2011 and are encouraged by our progress. Our work is mutually rewarding, as we are both focused on being able to realize lower costs while maintaining world-class performance on GaN-on-Si devices. This technology can be used to create lower cost LEDs that enable solid state lighting, more efficient power devices for applications such as power supplies and adapters, PV inverters for solar panels, and power conversion for electric vehicles.”

Veeco’s MOCVD equipment features excellent film quality and low defects, which are key for effective GaN-on-Si processing. It also incorporates Veeco's Uniform FlowFlange® technology for superior uniformity and excellent run-to-run repeatability. Low maintenance TurboDisc® technology enables highest system availability, excellent particle performance and high throughput.

Advanced silicon photonics technology

MOSIS, a provider of low-cost prototyping and small volume production services for custom ICs, teams up with ePIXfab, the European Silicon Photonics support centre providing low-cost prototyping services for photonic ICs. The partnership gives MOSIS' customers access to imec’s state-of-the-art fully integrated silicon photonics processes and Tyndall’s advanced silicon photonics packaging technology.

Packaged passive silicon photonics chip. 

Imec, silicon photonic chip; 

Tyndall, fibre array packaging.

Imec’s silicon photonics platform enables cost-effective R&D of silicon photonic ICs for high-performance optical transceivers (25Gb/s and beyond) for telecom, datacom, and optical sensing for life science applications. The offered integrated components include low-loss waveguides, efficient grating couplers, high-speed silicon electro-optic modulators and high-speed germanium waveguide photo-detectors. A comprehensive design kit to access imec technologies will be provided. Moreover, the Tyndall National Institute, being a partner of ePIXfab, offers the ability to provide packaged silicon photonics devices. This includes the design and fabrication of custom photonic packages, fibre coupling (single and arrays) and electrical interconnects. Designs rules to support these packaging capabilities will also be provided.

“Imec’s Silicon Photonics platform provides robust performance, and solutions to integrated photonics products. Companies can benefit from imec silicon photonics capability through established standard cells, or explore the functionality of their own designs in MultiProject Wafer runs,” stated Philippe Absil, program director at imec. “With this collaboration MOSIS will offer its first access to a mature Silicon Photonics infrastructure, with the option for follow on production” added Wes Hansford, MOSIS Director.

The first ePIXfab-Europractice run for passive silicon photonics ICs is open for registration from June 2013 with design deadline September 9th 2013. MOSIS' customers can register for this run and obtain the design kit via MOSIS in June 2013.

Imec’s Si Photonics 200mm wafer platform offers extensive design flexibility and includes:
• Tight within-wafer silicon thickness variation 3sigma < 2.5nm
• 3-level patterning of 220nm top Si layer (193nm optical lithography)
• poly-Si overlay and patterning (193nm optical lithography)
• 3-level n-type implants and 3-level p-type implants in Si
• Ge epitaxial growth on Si and p-type and n-type implants in Ge
• Local NiSi contacts, Tungsten vias and Cu metal interconnects
• Al bond pads
• Validated cell library with fibre couplers, polarization rotators, highly efficient carrier depletion modulators and ultra-compact Ge waveguide photo-detectors with low dark current. 
• Design kit support for IPKISS framework, PhoeniX Software and Mentor Graphics software
Tyndall’s Si Photonics Packaging Technology enables
• Passive device packaging , single and mult-fibre arrays to grating couplers
• Active device packaging, modulators and detectors with electrical ports and fibre arrays
• Custom packaging requirements (mechanical, thermal stability etc.)

Breakthrough in augmented reality contact lens

Strictly speaking this is hardly automation but it is a fascinating glimpse into work on LCD displays and applications in the development of contact lenses.

The Centre of Microsystems Technology (CMST), imec’s associated laboratory at Ghent University (B), has developed an innovative spherical curved LCD display, which can be embedded in contact lenses. The first step toward fully pixelated contact lens displays, this achievement has potential wide-spread applications in medical and cosmetic domains.

Unlike LED-based contact lens displays, which are limited to a few small pixels, imec’s innovative LCD-based technology permits the use of the entire display surface. By adapting the patterning process of the conductive layer, this technology enables applications with a broad range of pixel number and sizes, such as a one pixel, fully covered contact lens acting as adaptable sunglasses, or a highly pixelated contact lens display.

The first prototype presented today contains a patterned dollar sign, depicting the many cartoons that feature people or figures with dollars in their eyes. It can only display rudimentary patterns, similar to an electronic pocket calculator. In the future, the researchers envision fully autonomous electronic contact lenses embedded with this display. These next-generation solutions could be used for medical purposes, for example to control the light transmission toward the retina in case of a damaged iris, or for cosmetic purposes such as an iris with a tunable color. In the future, the display could also function as a head-up display, superimposing an image onto the user’s normal view. However, there are still hurdles to overcome for broader consumer and civilian implementation.

“Normally, flexible displays using liquid crystal cells are not designed to be formed into a new shape, especially not a spherical one. Thus, the main challenge was to create a very thin, spherically curved substrate with active layers that could withstand the extreme molding processes,” said Jelle De Smet, the main researcher on the project. “Moreover, since we had to use very thin polymer films, their influence on the smoothness of the display had to be studied in detail. By using new kinds of conductive polymers and integrating them into a smooth spherical cell, we were able to fabricate a new LCD-based contact lens display.”

Prof. Herbert De Smet, who is supervising CMST’s display group further comments: “Now that we have established the basic technology, we can start working towards real applications, possibly available in only a few years time."

Harvesting vibration energy

Imec and Holst Centre have made a micromachined harvester for vibration energy with a record output power of 489µW. Measurements and simulation show that the harvester is also suited for shock-induced energy harvesting in car tyres, where it could power built-in sensors. In a tyre, at 70km/h, the new device can deliver a constant 42µW, which is enough to power a simple wireless sensor node. These results, obtained within the research centre’s program for Micropower Generation and Storage, are presented at the 2011 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Washington (December 7-9 2011).

Harvesters with various dimensions. The shiny capacitor stack on top of the beam is visible through the glass package.

Imec’s innovative harvester consists of a cantilever with a piezoelectric layer sandwiched between metallic electrodes, forming a capacitor. At the tip of the cantilever a mass is attached, which translates the macroscopic vibration into a vertical movement – putting strain on the piezoelectric layer and generating a voltage across the capacitor. As piezoelectric material, AlN (aluminum nitride) was chosen. The harvesters are packaged with a 6-inch wafer scale vacuum packaging process. The micromachining production process is compatible with low-cost mass-production fabrication.

The harvester has a record output power of 489µW when the vibrations closely match the MEMS’ resonance vibration, which in this case is 1011Hz. Together with an automotive partner, imec also validated the use of the harvester for use in car tires. These submit the harvester to regular shocks, depending on the car’s speed and the characteristics and condition of the tire. Each shock will displace the mass, after which it will start to ring down at its natural resonance frequency. During this ring-down period, which depends on the quality factor Q of the harvester, part of the mechanical energy is harvested. It is shown that in this way, a constant power output as high as 42µW can be harvested at a speed of 70km/h.

Micromachined vibration harvesters such as these are ideal devices to generate electricity from machines, engines and other industrial appliances which vibrate or undergo repetitive shocks. In these environments, they will power miniaturized autonomous sensor nodes, in situations where battery replacement is not sustainable or practical. Harvesters will allow sustainable monitoring on a massive scale. One example is Tyre Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) and its successors: a car tyre with built-in sensors that monitor e.g. the tire integrity and pressure, the road condition, or the driving style.

Co-operation in thin film PV R&D

Imec and Solliance have announced that imec will be a full partner of Solliance and will integrate its thin film PV R&D efforts in Solliance. With imec as a partner, Solliance aims to be an R&D cluster bringing thin film solar energy technology to excellence.

Solliance works in close cooperation with industry, both to fulfill short-term needs of industry, and to convey promising programs of mid- and long-term research. It focuses on three main thin film technologies: thin film Si, alternatives for CIGS, and organic photovoltaics (OPV). For these principal themes Solliance will collaborate with the industry at its facilities in Eindhoven as well as at imec’s facilities in Leuven, providing direct answers to the industry’s most pressing questions. Solliance also concentrates on generic technologies that will be vital to any thin film PV industry: testing, characterization and monitoring, laser technologies, light management by mechanical texturization, transparent conductive layers, monolithic interconnection, new OPV device development, thin film deposition techniques, sheet-to-sheet processing, roll-to-roll (R2R) processing, and in-line monitoring.

Says Luc Van den hove, President and CEO imec: “The joining of forces in Solliance creates focus and critical mass, needed to be a top level player in the world of thin film PV.” And Hein Willems, Solliance’s managing director: “Strengthened by imec as the fifth member, our research now stretches across the entire field, from fundamentals of materials science to sophisticated production technologies.”  Imec specifically excels in nanoelectronics, and harbors CIGS-related and OPV research teams of significant volume and expertise. It will now continue its thin film R&D within the Solliance cooperation.

Solliance’s ambition is to strengthen the position of the Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen triangle (ELAT region) as a world player in thin film PV. Solliance now creates synergy among more than 250 researchers with this common goal. Solliance aims to realize this ambition by joint use of state-of-the-art infrastructure, alignment of research programs, and close cooperation with the solar business community. Solliance is amongst others financially supported by the Dutch Province of Brabant.

The announcement is being celebrated at the annual imec booth reception at PVSEC in Hamburg on 7 September at the imec booth, hall B4G booth C11, at 16.30 o’clock.

Towards an e-nose!

Imec and Holst Centre report gas sensor chip paving the way to autonomous e-nose

Imec and Holst Centre have developed very sensitive integrated sensing elements for gas detection. The polymer-coated microbridges in high-density arrays can detect ppm-level concentrations of vapors using on-chip integrated read-out techniques. The demonstrated technology is very suitable for miniaturization of electronic nose devices thanks to the low power consumption and small form factor.

Wireless sensor nodes that can chemically detect gaseous compounds are rapidly gaining interest from markets such as food monitoring, healthcare and safety. One of the main gas sensing approaches in uncontrolled environments is the identification of vapors (“smells”) using multiple sensing elements (“receptors”), in a system that is often referred to as an “electronic nose” or “e-nose”. An accurate e-nose requires small, integrated, low-power detectors with individually tuned chemical coatings. Current solutions, like chemi-resistors or quartz crystals are however not scalable or power-efficient enough to build low-power small form factor e-noses.

They have developed a new generation of microbridges with embedded individual piezoelectric “shakers” in a high-density array with very high fabrication yield. The novel design allows for rapid coating of a range of absorbents on individual microbridges using commercial inkjet printing technology. The suspended structures vibrate individually, and changes in their modes of vibration (resonances) are monitored as an indication of vapor absorption in their coatings. Due to the very high length-to-thickness ratio of the microbridges, imec and Holst Centre’s novel gas sensor chip has a high sensitivity to low-concentration vapors. Moreover, by implementing integrated piezoelectric read-out schemes, ultra-low power operation could be demonstrated.

Current work is ongoing to integrate the structures with low-power analog read-out circuits and to demonstrate simultaneous measurements from multiple structures. This truly low-power miniaturized implementation of an e-nose technology can be used in current applications such as wine and cheese monitoring, but could in the future also help sniff-out human conditions such as asthma, lung cancer, and kidney diseases.

Heart activity signal processor

At the International Solid State Circuit Conference (San Francisco CA US), imec and Holst Centre report an analog-signal processor ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) – in short ASP - that reduces the overall power consumption of an ambulatory heart activity signal monitoring systems by more than 5 times. This is a major step towards autonomous wireless sensor systems, which constantly monitor the patient’s health for diagnosis of chronic illness.

In today’s biomedical wireless sensor systems, a lot of power consumption is wasted in the DSP (digital signal processor) or radio by continuously processing biopotential signals (e.g. ECG or electrocardiogram), or transmitting raw data over the wireless link. And, today’s ambulatory biomedical sensor systems also suffer from motion artifacts which affects the robustness of detection algorithms and demands even more processing power.

The innovative ASP, developed within imec’s and Holst Centre’s HUMAN++ program, uses an adaptive sampling scheme based on activity detection. This reduces the amount of data which needs to be processed by the DSP or transmitted by the radio. By preprocessing the signal, a simplified DSP can be used for accurate R-peak detection resulting in lower power consumption of the DSP. Motion artifacts are detected by continuously monitoring the electrode-tissue impedance. The impedance monitoring can also be used for ensuring signal integrity by continuously checking the electrode connectivity.

The ASP has a record low power consumption of only 30µW operating from 2V. It consists of an ECG readout channel, two quadrature readout channels for continuous-time monitoring of electrode-tissue impedance, and two quadrature readout channels for tracking signal fluctuations in a specific frequency band. The ASP also includes an activity detector that senses the frequency content of the ECG signal and adapts the sampling rate of the integrated ADC (analog to digital convertor) for the digitization of the ECG signal. The ASP stage reduces the power consumption of the DSP and wireless transmission by 11 and 6 times respectively. This results in an overall system power dissipation below 300µW for the complete wireless heart activity signal monitoring system which is more than 5 times more power efficient than its predecessors. This power budget also includes the additional functionality of continuous-time electrode-tissue contact impedance measurement.

“Within the Human++ program, imec and Holst Centre develop solutions for an efficient and better healthcare. Self-powered intelligent body area networks with wireless sensors promise to be a solution for more comfortable healthcare systems. This breakthrough is a major step towards constant ambulatory monitoring of people using energy harvesting, which increases the comfort level of patients and is a cost- and time-efficient alternative for current monitoring systems;” said Bert Gyselinckx, general manager imec the Netherlands at Holst Centre.

Industry can get access to this technology by joining the Human++ program as research partner or by licensing agreements for further product development.