Analysis
EU FP7 continues to support Europractice IC services
Imec, together with its partners STFC and Fraunhofer IIS, have today announced that the European Commission has pledged to continue funding the Europractice IC services for another 3 years under the FP7 program. Europractice IC services also supports companies in the assembly and testing phase. Over the next three years, the service will expand its offering from ASIC services to prototyping possibilities in MEMS and photonics-related technologies.
The Europractice IC service is internationally recognized as a leading service to universities and industry for design, development, prototyping and manufacturing of state-of-the-art application specific integrated circuits on a cost-sharing basis. Today, about 500 universities, 150 research centers and more than 200 European companies have access to this service.
Europractice IC services offers dedicated training courses on design flows and methods in advanced technologies, and has negotiated low cost opportunities with the most popular industry-standard CAD vendors and foundries. As such, academics and research centers have access to state-of-the-art CAD tools for training and non-commercial research, and to multi-project wafer runs for prototyping and manufacturing.