The pace of technological development in the area of microelectronics is constantly accelerating, which poses considerable challenges to mid-sized enterprises as drivers of innovation. Especially high-performance products that are perfectly adapted to the specific applications are becoming the standard requirements of many customers. However, such “smart” and networked systems are often needed only in small volumes and require highly integrated technical solutions. Because standard semiconductor solutions cannot be used for this, mid-sized companies will also need to have specialized technologies in their portfolios in the future. However, the development costs of such technologies are often too high for many companies, and the development times are too long.
Project Goal
The participating partners have therefore started to develop a technology platform through which also smaller companies can get access to next generation microelectronics-based sensing technologies. Interested mid-sized companies can also share their requirements with the research network, help to shape the content of demonstrators and be the first to test them.
Approach & Added Value
Against this background, the project partners are developing a new type of sensor platform that will employ a modular approach to enable automated generation of a broad range of innovative components and their integration into a complete system. The project partners are relying here on a central control and processing unit with numerous interfaces as well as a wide selection of current and future sensors and actuators. Alongside the system architecture with flexible building blocks, the platform also offers innovative solutions for hardware and IT security. Eventually, the sensor module should be available in a diverse range of design variants to cover hundreds of different use cases.
This new platform under development is based on the 22FDX technology (Fully Depleted SOI) of Globalfoundries, which was developed in Dresden and enables highly integrated chips with especially low-power and inexpensive properties. The participating Fraunhofer Institutes, also key research partners of the High Performance Center, are contributing to USeP in particular in the following areas
- innovative packaging
- system development concepts
- system design
- sensor systems and data transmission
- simulation and testing.