At the European Electric Vehicle Batteries Summit, imec and partner in EnergyVille, announced a solid-state Li-metal battery cell with an unsurpassed energy density of 400 Wh/litre at a charging speed of 0.5C (2 hours). Imec have also started to upscale the materials and processes in a pilot line for fabrication of solid-state pouch cells at the EnergyVille Campus in Genk and is set-up in collaboration with the University of Hasselt.

At SiliconPV 2019, research and innovation hub, imec, announced that its n-PERT (Passivated Emitter and Rear Totally diffused) solar cells developed with Jolywood, have reached a certified front-side conversion efficiency of 23.2%. With cost-efficient processing and a clear path to higher efficiencies, this makes these n-PERT cells a serious contender to p-PERC technology.

The European Research Council has awarded an advanced grant to Paul Heremans, Fellow and Director Large Area Electronics at imec. Paul Heremans will receive €2.5m for a five year project to develop ultra-bright thin-film light sources and lasers, a technology with a wide variety of applications, such as optical interconnects, augmented reality displays and lidar sensors.

At the embedded world Conference 2019, imec presented a silicon-based compact microchannel heat sink that enables high heat flux dissipation. The imec heat sink assembled to a high performance chip for cooling the latter one achieves a low total thermal resistance of 0,34K/W to 0.28K/W at less than two watt pump power.

This week at the 2019 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC2019), imec will be announcing its radar transceiver designed as an efficient, low cost solution for presence detection in smart building solutions. The power consumption of the radar is below 1mW, which is 100 times lower than other solutions, and is capable of detecting even micro-movements from human respiration, up to a distance of 15 metres.

At the 2019 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC2019), imec, a research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, will present a compact, highly linear 3.2 giga-sample-per-second (GSps) RF-sampling ADC that uses ring amplification (ringamp).

Research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics, energy and digital technologies, imec, along with EnergyVille have presented a new simulation framework that can reportedly accurately calculate the energy yield of bifacial PV systems (also capturing reflected light from the ground).

The research and innovation hub, Imec, and Ghent University, alongside Medtronic and other CARDIS project partners, have developed a prototype medical device based on silicon photonics for the screening of arterial stiffness and for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases such as arterial stenosis and heart failure.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2019), in Las Vegas, imec and TNO are presenting the latest version of their health patch. Developed in the framework of the Holst Centre in Eindhoven, the new health patch offers comfort and a long battery life. It can also be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of previous generations, making it a user-friendly, disposable solution for ambulant patient monitoring.

The and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, Imec, and its partners STFC-UKRI, Fraunhofer IIS, CMP and Tyndall, have announced that Europractice was selected and granted European funding as a H2020 project. This new funding secures the Europractice services to European universities, research institutes and industry until the end of 2021. 

At this week’s 2018 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), imec, the research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technology, reported significant progress in process enabling the introduction of gate-all-around (GAA) transistors with vertically stacked nanowires and nanosheets for the N3 technology node.

At the IEEE IEDM 2018 conference, imec, the research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, presented a demonstration of 3D stacked FinFETs on 300mm wafers using a sequential integration approach with a 45nm fin pitch and 110nm poly pitch technology. 

At the 2018 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), imec, the research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, presented a power-performance-area comparison between SRAM- and SST-MRAM-based last-level caches at the five nanometre node. 

At the 2018 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), imec, and its partners presented an experimental demonstration of full majority gate operation based on spin-wave interference in scaled devices. Circuit-level benchmarking recommends majority gates based on spin-waves for ultralow power applications. 

During the state visit of His Excellency Emmanuel Macron President of the French Republic, the Belgian research centre imec and the French research institute CEA-Leti, two research and innovation hubs in nanotechnologies for industry, announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that lays the foundation of a strategic partnership in the domains of Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing.

In Japan at the imec technology forum (ITF Japan 2018), imec, the research and innovation, the Ghent University (UGent), and contact lens manufacturer SEED, announced that they have developed a contact lens with an integrated LED light, including an ultra-thin silicon microchip, radio‐frequency (RF) antenna for wireless energy transfer, and stretchable thin‐film interconnections. 

  This week at Vision 2018 (November 6th to 8th, 2018), imec, the research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, will present a high-speed UV-sensitive time-delay-integration (TDI) imager that is based on charge-coupled-device (CCD)-in-CMOS technology. 

At the EU PVSEC conference, imec presented a thin-film tandem solar cell consisting of a top perovskite cell developed by imec within the partnerships of EnergyVille and Solliance, and a bottom CIGS cell from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research. The tandem cell resulting from this collaboration achieves a record efficiency of 24.6 percent.

The research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, imec, has released and is making available its high-density neural probe, Neuropixels, to the global neuroscience research community. With almost a thousand electrodes, and 384 recording channels on a single shank, the Neuropixels probe provides an unprecedented resolution for mapping brain activity.

Research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, imec, and ASML Holding, lithographic equipment provider, have announced the next step in their extensive collaboration. Together, they will accelerate the adoption of EUV lithography for high-volume production, including the current latest available equipment for EUV (0.33 Numerical Aperture, NA).