imec and Holst Centre have developed small NO2 sensors featuring a low power consumption in the mW range. Suitable for air quality monitoring, the sensors serve as a solution to the increased demand for accurate local air quality monitoring for indoor and outdoor environments. The sensors have a low detection limit for NO2 and a fast response time.

Today at the Imec Technology Forum, imec announces that Toshiba and SanDisk have joined the research centre's industrial affiliation programme on advanced patterning. The programme tackles the critical challenges that remain in bringing EUVL to high volume manufacturing and also develops other technologies for extending 193nm immersion lithography.

At a celebratory event in New York City to announce the final results of the GreenTouch consortium’s five years of work, imec unveiled an advanced power model that provides a realistic prediction of the power consumption of present and future cellular base stations, which are vital to the mobile networks used by millions of people worldwide each day. The model supports a broad range of operating conditions and cellular base station types, c...

At this week’s VLSI 2015 Symposium in Kyoto (Japan), imec reported new results on nanowire FETs and quantum-well FinFETs towards post-FinFET multi-gate device solutions. 

At Intersolar Europe, imec introduced a thin-film perovskite PV module with a power conversion efficiency of 8% over an aperture area of 16cm2. The remarkable geometrical fill factor of more than 95% for this size of module demonstrates the potential of scaling up this thin-film PV technology from cell to module level. The achievement is an important breakthrough in realising a marketable thin-film solution for applications such as Building Integ...

At Intersolar Europe, imec announced an efficiency record for its large area n-type Passivated Emitter, Rear Totally diffused (PERT) crystalline silicon (Cz-Si) solar cell, now reaching 22.5% (calibrated at ISE CalLab). It is the highest efficiency achieved for a two-side-contacted solar cell processed on 6" commercially available n-type Cz-Si wafers without the use of passivated contacts.

Fujifilm and imec have demonstrated full-colour OLEDs by using their jointly-developed photoresist technology for organic semiconductors, a technology that enables sub-μm patterning. This breakthrough result paves the way to producing high-resolution and large organic Electroluminescent (EL) displays and establishing cost-competitive manufacturing methods.

At the recent IEEE IITC conference in Grenoble, France, nanoelectronics research center imec and Tokyo Electron Limited jointly presented a direct copper etch scheme for patterning Cu interconnects. The scheme has great potential to overcome resistivity and reliability issues that occur while scaling conventional Cu damascene interconnects for advanced nodes.

During the IEEE IITC conference in Grenoble, nanoelectronics research centre imec and Lam Research jointly presented a bottom-up prefill technique for vias and contacts. The technique, based on ElectroLess Deposition (ELD) of cobalt, is a highly selective method resulting in void-free filling of via and contact holes. Potentially increasing the circuit performance, it is a promising path to scaling advanced interconnects and enabling future logic...

Imec presents ten papers and six posters at the IEEE Interconnect Technology Conference and Advanced Metallization Conference, 18th to 21st May 2015. The results, achieved in collaboration with its industrial partners, cover different domains of imec’s industrial affiliation progammes on advanced interconnects and 3D-IC technology.

JSR has signed a letter of intent to partner in enabling manufacturing and quality control of EUV lithography materials for the semiconductor industry. This partnership will be formalised by establishing a joint venture with imec as minority shareholder.

sureCore and imec are collaborating on low-power SRAM IP, including the licensing of a set of imec SRAM design IP to sureCore to expand sureCore's IP portfolio and a participation in sureCore. In order to tap into the design ecosystem around imec, sureCore will establish a branch in Leuven which will consist of highly experienced designers who built up their expertise at imec and who will be instrumental in the collaboration between sureCore and ...

At OFC 2015, imec, together with its lab at Ghent University (Intec) and Stanford University, demonstrated a compact germanium waveguide Electro-Absorption Modulator (EAM) with a modulation bandwidth beyond 50GHz. Combining state-of-the-art extinction ratio and low insertion loss with capacitance of just 10fF, the EAM marks an important milestone for the realisation of next-gen silicon integrated optical interconnects at 50Gb/s and beyond.

Scientists from Ghent University and imec have joined forces with the Max Planck Institute in Garching to realise a frequency comb light source in the mid-IR wavelength band. These frequency comb light sources with an extended spectrum can be used for real-time, extremely high resolution spectroscopy, for instance, to measure the presence and concentration of gas molecules in analytes.

At the the 2015 International Solid State Circuits Conference, imec, in collaboration with the Tyndall National Institute, the University of Leuven (KULeuven) and the Ghent University, demonstrated a 4x20Gb/s Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) hybrid CMOS silicon photonics transceiver. 

InterDigital, imec and Peraso Technologies have jointly announced the integration of their respective technologies into the world’s first WiGig-based mm-wave mesh backhaul system. The technology will enable easier deployments for small cell mobile backhaul, resulting in lower cost solutions for high-speed data delivery in 4G and 5G networks.

At the 2015 International Solid State Circuits Conference, imec and Panasonic presented a transceiver chip for phase-modulated continuous-wave radar at 79GHz. This device demonstrates the potential of downscaled CMOS for low-cost millimetre-wave radar systems that can be used for accurate presence and motion detection.

At the 2015 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Imec, Holst Centre and Renesas presented an ultra-low power 2.4GHz short range radio compliant with BLE and IEEE802.15.4 (ZigBee). Implemented in 40nm CMOS, the radio achieves a supply voltage reduced by 20%, power consumption reduced by 25% and chip area reduced by 35%, as compared to the previous 90nm RF front-end design.

At 2015’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, imec, Murata and Huawei will present a standalone multiband electrical-balance duplexer in 0.18µm SOI CMOS. This type of duplexer is a promising alternative to the fixed‑frequency Surface-Acoustic Wave (SAW) filters implemented in mobile phones providing transmit-to-receive (TX-to-RX) isolation.

At the SPIE Advanced Lithography 2015 conference, which takes place from 22nd to 26th February in San Jose, imec will present breakthrough results on Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) process development. Together with semiconductor equipment supplier Tokyo Electron and Merck, imec has significantly improved DSA defectivity in the past year, approaching single-digit values.