Tag Archives: Tyndall National Institute

Nanowire fingerprint technology

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Apparently this technology from France’s Laboratoire d’électronique des technologies de l’information (CEA-Leti) will make fingerprinting more reliable. From a Sept. 5, 2017 news item on Nanowerk,

Leti today announced that the European R&D project known as PiezoMAT has developed a pressure-based fingerprint sensor that enables resolution more than twice as high as currently required by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The project’s proof of concept demonstrates that a matrix of interconnected piezoelectric zinc-oxide (ZnO) nanowires grown on silicon can reconstruct the smallest features of human fingerprints at 1,000 dots per inch (DPI).

“The pressure-based fingerprint sensor derived from the integration of piezo-electric ZnO nanowires grown on silicon opens the path to ultra-high resolution fingerprint sensors, which will be able to reach resolution much higher than 1,000 DPI,” said Antoine Viana, Leti’s project manager. “This technology holds promise for significant improvement in both security and identification applications.”

A Sept. 5, 2017 Leti press release, which originated the news item, delves further,

The eight-member project team of European companies, universities and research institutes fabricated a demonstrator embedding a silicon chip with 250 pixels, and its associated electronics for signal collection and post-processing. The chip was designed to demonstrate the concept and the major technological achievements, not the maximum potential nanowire integration density. Long-term development will pursue full electronics integration for optimal sensor resolution.

The project also provided valuable experience and know-how in several key areas, such as optimization of seed-layer processing, localized growth of well-oriented ZnO nanowires on silicon substrates, mathematical modeling of complex charge generation, and synthesis of new polymers for encapsulation. The research and deliverables of the project have been presented in scientific journals and at conferences, including Eurosensors 2016 in Budapest.

The 44-month, €2.9 million PiezoMAT (PIEZOelectric nanowire MATrices) research project was funded by the European Commission in the Seventh Framework Program. Its partners include:

  • Leti (Grenoble, France): A leading European center in the field of microelectronics, microtechnology and nanotechnology R&D, Leti is one of the three institutes of the Technological Research Division at CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Leti’s activities span basic and applied research up to pilot industrial lines. www.leti-cea.com/cea-tech/leti/english
  • Fraunhofer IAF (Freiburg, Germany): Fraunhofer IAF, one of the leading research facilities worldwide in the field of III-V semiconductors, develops electronic and optical devices based on modern micro- and nanostructures. Fraunhofer IAF’s technologies find applications in areas such as security, energy, communication, health, and mobility. www.iaf.fraunhofer.de/en
  • Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary):  The Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science, one of the institutes of the Research Centre, conducts interdisciplinary research on complex functional materials and nanometer-scale structures, exploration of physical, chemical, and biological principles, and their exploitation in integrated micro- and nanosystems www.mems.hu, www.energia.mta.hu/en
  • Universität Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany): Germany’s second-oldest university with continuous teaching, established in 1409, hosts about 30,000 students in liberal arts, medicine and natural sciences. One of its scientific profiles is “Complex Matter”, and contributions to PIEZOMAT are in the field of nanostructures and wide gap materials. www.zv.uni-leipzig.de/en/
  • Kaunas University of Technology (Kaunas, Lithuania): One of the largest technical universities in the Baltic States, focusing its R&D activities on novel materials, smart devices, advanced measurement techniques and micro/nano-technologies. The Institute of Mechatronics specializes on multi-physics simulation and dynamic characterization of macro/micro-scale transducers with well-established expertise in the field of piezoelectric devices. http://en.ktu.lt/
  • SPECIFIC POLYMERS (Castries, France): SME with twelve employees and an annual turnover of about 1M€, SPECIFIC POLYMERS acts as an R&D service provider and scale-up producer in the field of functional polymers with high specificity (>1000 polymers in catalogue; >500 customers; >50 countries). www.specificpolymers.fr/
  • Tyndall National Institute (Cork, Ireland): Tyndall National Institute is one of Europe’s leading research centres in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) research and development and the largest facility of its type in Ireland. The Institute employs over 460 researchers, engineers and support staff, with a full-time graduate cohort of 135 students. With a network of 200 industry partners and customers worldwide, Tyndall generates around €30M income each year, 85% from competitively won contracts nationally and internationally. Tyndall is a globally leading Institute in its four core research areas of Photonics, Microsystems, Micro/Nanoelectronics and Theory, Modeling and Design. www.tyndall.ie/
  • OT-Morpho (Paris, France): OT-Morpho is a world leader in digital security & identification technologies with the ambition to empower citizens and consumers alike to interact, pay, connect, commute, travel and even vote in ways that are now possible in a connected world. As our physical and digital, civil and commercial lifestyles converge, OT-Morpho stands precisely at that crossroads to leverage the best in security and identity technologies and offer customized solutions to a wide range of international clients from key industries, including Financial services, Telecom, Identity, Security and IoT. With close to €3bn in revenues and more than 14,000 employees, OT-Morpho is the result of the merger between OT (Oberthur Technologies) and Safran Identity & Security (Morpho) completed in 31 May 2017. Temporarily designated by the name “OT-Morpho”, the new company will unveil its new name in September 2017. For more information, visit www.morpho.com and www.oberthur.com

I have tended to take fingerprint technology for granted but last fall (2016) I stumbled on a report suggesting that forensic sciences, including fingerprinting, was perhaps not as conclusive as one might expect after watching fictional police procedural television programmes. My Sept. 23, 2016 posting features the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report (‘Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods‘ 174 pp PDF).

ASCENT: access to European Nanoelectronics Infrastructure

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ASCENT is an Irish-French-Belgian-led collaborative project designed to open up state of the state-of-the-art facilities to researchers across Europe. From a June 10, 2015 news item on Nanowerk,

ASCENT opens the doors to the world’s most advanced nanoelectronics infrastructures in Europe. Tyndall National Institute in Ireland, CEA-Leti in France and imec in Belgium, leading European nanoelectronics institutes, have entered into a collaborative open-access project called ASCENT (Access to European Nanoelectronics Network), to mobilise European research capabilities like never before.

The €4.7 million project will make the unique research infrastructure of three of Europe’s premier research centres available to the nanoelectronics modelling-and-characterisation research community.

A June 10, 2015 Imec press release, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

The three partners will provide researchers access to advanced device data, test chips and characterisation equipment. This access programme will enable the research community to explore exciting new developments in industry and meet the challenges created in an ever-evolving and demanding digital world.

The partners’ respective facilities are truly world-class, representing over €2 billion of combined research infrastructure with unique credentials in advanced semiconductor processing, nanofabrication, heterogeneous and 3D integration, electrical characterisation and atomistic and TCAD modelling. This is the first time that access to these state-of-the-art devices and test structures will become available anywhere in the world.

The project will engage industry directly through an ‘Industry Innovation Committee’ and will feed back the results of the open research to device manufacturers, giving them crucial information to improve the next generation of electronic devices.

Speaking on behalf of project coordinator, Tyndall National Institute, CEO Dr. Kieran Drain said: “We are delighted to coordinate the ASCENT programme and to be partners with world-leading institutes CEA-Leti and imec. Tyndall has a great track record in running successful collaborative open-access programmes, delivering real economic and societal impact. ASCENT has the capacity to change the paradigm of European research through unprecedented access to cutting-edge technologies. We are confident that ASCENT will ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of global nanoelectronics development.”

“The ASCENT project is an efficient, strategic way to open the complementary infrastructure and expertise of Tyndall, Leti and imec to a broad range of researchers from Europe’s nanoelectronics modelling-and-characterisation sectors,” said Leti CEO Marie-Noëlle Semeria. “Collaborative projects like this, that bring together diverse, dedicated and talented people, have synergistic affects that benefit everyone involved, while addressing pressing technological challenges.”

“In the frame of the ASCENT project, three of Europe’s leading research institutes – Tyndall, imec and Leti – join forces in supporting the EU research and academic community, SMEs and industry by providing access to test structures and electrical data of state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies,” stated Luc Van den hove, CEO of imec. “This will enable them to explore exciting new opportunities in the ‘More Moore’ [probably a Moore’s law reference] as well as the ‘More than Moore’ domains, and will allow them to participate and compete effectively on the global stage for the development of advanced nano-electronics.”

I’m curious as to how they plan to balance industry requests with academic requests. Will organizations that can afford to pay more get preference?

Make your carbon atoms stand taller to improve electronic devices

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Scientists from Ireland ((Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork [UCC]) and Singapore (National University of Singapore [NUS]) have jointly published a paper about how they achieved a ten-fold increase in the switching efficiency of electronic devices by changing one carbon atom. From the Jan. 21, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

These devices could provide new ways to combat overheating in mobile phones and laptops, and could also aid in electrical stimulation of tissue repair for wound healing.

The breakthrough creation of molecular devices with highly controllable electrical properties will appear in the February [2013] issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Dr. Damien Thompson at the Tyndall National Institute, UCC and a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore led by Prof. Chris Nijhuis designed and created the devices, which are based on molecules acting as electrical valves, or diode rectifiers.

Dr. Thompson explains, “These molecules are very useful because they allow current to flow through them when switched ON and block current flow when switched OFF. The results of the study show that simply adding one extra carbon is sufficient to improve the device performance by more than a factor of ten. We are following up lots of new ideas based on these results, and we hope ultimately to create a range of new components for electronic devices.” Dr. Thompson’s atom-level computer simulations showed how molecules with an odd number of carbon atoms stand straighter than molecules with an even number of carbon atoms. This allows them to pack together more closely. Tightly-packed assemblies of these molecules were formed on metal electrode surfaces by the Nijhuis group in Singapore and were found to be remarkably free of defects. These high quality devices can suppress leakage currents and so operate efficiently and reliably. The device can be cleanly switched on and off purely on the basis of the charge and shape of the molecules, just like in the biological nanomachines that regulate photosynthesis, cell division and tissue growth.

The Jan. ??, 2013 University College Cork news release, which originated the news item, provides more details,

The combined experiments and simulations show for the first time that minute improvements in molecule orientation and packing trigger changes in van der Waals forces that are sufficiently large to dramatically improve the performance of electronic devices. Dr. Thompson explains: “These van der Waals forces are the weakest of all intermolecular forces and only become significant when summed over large areas. Hence, up until now, the majority of research into ultra-small devices has used stronger “pi-pi” interactions to stick molecules together, and has ignored the much weaker, but ubiquitous, van der Waals interactions. The present study shows how van der Waals effects, which are present in every conceivable molecular scale device, can be tuned to optimise the performance of the device.”

The devices are based on molecules that act as diodes by allowing current to pass through them when operated at forward bias and blocking current when the bias is reversed. Molecular rectifiers were first proposed back in 1974, and advances in scientific computing have allowed molecular‐level design to be used over the past decade to develop new organic materials that provide better electrical responses. However, the relative importance of the interactions between the molecules, the nature of the molecule-metal contact and the influence of environmental effects have been questioned. This new research demonstrates that dramatic improvements in device performance may be achieved by controlling the van der Waals forces that pack the molecules together. Simply changing the number of carbon atoms by one provides significantly more stable and more reproducible devices that exhibit an order of magnitude improvement in ON/OFF ratio. The research findings demonstrate the feasibility of boosting device performances by creating tighter seals between molecules.

Here a citation and a link to the paper,

The role of van der Waals forces in the performance of molecular diodes by Nisachol Nerngchamnong, Li Yuan, Dong-Chen Qi, Jiang Li, Damien Thompson, & Christian A. Nijhuis. Nature Nanotechnology (2013) doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.238 Advance online publication: Jan. 6, 2013.

This paper is behind a paywall.