Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - NANOARCHITECTRONICS (NANOARCHITECTRONICS)

Teaser

This FET-CSA project, entitled “Nanoarchitectronics” (NTX) proposal gathers thirteen universities, research centers and high-tech industries, belonging to eight European countries. The name Nanoarchitectronics comes from the merger of three key terms: “nano”...

Summary

This FET-CSA project, entitled “Nanoarchitectronics” (NTX) proposal gathers thirteen universities, research centers and high-tech industries, belonging to eight European countries. The name Nanoarchitectronics comes from the merger of three key terms: “nano”, “architecture” and “electronics”. It is a new technology, based on nanoscale building block, for conceiving, designing and developing reconfigurable, adaptive and cognitive functional system interfaces for ICT applications. This is a new interdisciplinary scientific area that addresses the research and applications in the huge frequency spectrum at the crossroad of Electromagnetics, Metamaterial, Electronics, and Photonics through the use of Nanotechnology and Wave-Matter interaction.
The relevance for the society is due to the fact that the European society’s grand challenge in ICT, brings today to a large variety of platforms, systems and functionalities. Trying to address this broad variety of entities in a unitary frame implies operation and communications in an extremely broad range of frequencies with high level of functionalities and component integration. This requires an unprecedented level of technological convergence into a revolutionary framework, which has the final vision to unify the interaction between humans or systems with the surrounding environment by means of adaptive, cognitive, sensorial and scalable “system interfaces” connected with the environment. NTX is the game-changer enabling technology envisaged to develop such new kind of systems and components.
The major objective of this CSA is laying the foundation of an ever-increasing Nanotechnology-based synergy between Electromagnetics, Metamaterial, Electronics, and Photonics and to boost the future application-driven research through the establishment of an accepted language among physicists and engineers, a shared way of thinking, a common theoretical foundation and a common strategy for the future. A second objective is concerned to establish the boundary, the road map, the research agenda, and the dissemination plan of Nanoarchitectronics and its boundary with respect to existing and initiatives. A third objective is attracting new researchers, especially in early stage and/or from SME in this new research, by organizing a training program constituted by a cycle of courses on the main research areas of NTX.
To achieve these objectives, Nanoarchitectronics is structured in four main activities. The “Concept” activity is devoted to establish and define the concepts of Nanoarchitectronics and its boundaries with respect to other disciplines and to the activity carried out by other consortia. The “Strategy” activity identifies the policy dialogue and the strategic view of the consortium in terms of position, impact and vision. The “Virtual Networking” serves to internal web communication (private), and for dissemination (public). The “Dissemination and Exploitation” activity, is mainly carried out through PhD short courses and scientific Workshops and special sessions.

Work performed

During the whole project the four areas, “Concept”, “Virtual Networking”, “Strategy” and “Dissemination and Exploitation” have been identified and realized (the first yearhas been mainly devoted to the “Concept” and the “Virtual Networking” areas, the second to “Strategy ” and “Dissemination and Exploitation” activities)

CONCEPT

The concept area has been divided in 3 WPs:

• Extreme Scale Electromagnetic Interactions (EXEMI-WP1)
NTX systems enabling or improving the performance of electromagnetic (EM) systems over the whole frequency spectrum through wave-matter interaction at nanoscale level.

• Metatronics (MTX-WP2)
Generation of space-time varying, controllable nano-structured, new materials exhibiting unusual EM macroscopic properties and functionalities.

• Surfacetronics (SFX-WP3)
Conception, analysis and realization of reconfigurable, sensorial, adaptive and cognitive interface for sensing, communications, radar, and cloaking.

STRATEGY

The Strategy WPs are divided in “Position Paper” (WP4) and “Strategic Research Agenda and Road Map” (WP5).
The relevant deliverables have been uploaded in the Funding&Tenders Portal.

The following objectives have been identified and realized:
• Structure, content and expected impact of the position paper,
• Impact on the Industrial Leadership and Societal Challenges areas of H2020;
• Design a methodology to work efficiently toward gathering and collecting the inputs.
• The SWOT methodologyhas been identified to face each activity areas

VIRTUAL NETWORKING

During the first year of the NTX project, the activities on WP7 have been focused on:
• Analysis of the expected services of the Virtual Networking;
• Definition of the Data Management for the project;
• Deployment and starting the use the Virtual Networking.


During the second year the Virtual Research Centre was implemented and linked to our website (www.nanoarchitectronics.eu)

DISSEMINATION

During the whole project the activities have been focused on:

• Workshops

1. One workshop held in Paris, April 21, for people interested in NTX;
2. publicity to NTX within EOSAM 2018, Delft, 8 - 12 October 2018, and to 3rd ERP 3D Nanomanufacturing Dissemination Workshop, Delft, November 2017;
3. one workshop organised inside EuCAP 2018, London, 9-13 April 2018;
4. a Joint NTX-FORESEEN Workshop organised in London, QMUL College, May 4, 2017;
5. NTX participated to the Industry Day at Thales Research and Technology, July 2nd, 2018, PalaiseauParis TRT building;
6. another workshop was organised within the METAMATERIALS 2018, Espoo, Finland, 27-30 August 2018,
7. one workshop organised within NanoScience and Nanotechnology 2018, Frascati, 18-20 December 2018


• Exhibition

An exhibition stall was organized at the SPIE Photonics Europe conference (Strasbourg, France, April 2018)

• Participation to a Conference:

Presentation of a paper in the 2018 IEEE Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting;


• Schools for PhD students:

Three schools for PhD have been organized:
1. “Metasurface and Metratronics” University of Siena, Siena, Italy, 25-29 September 2017;
2. EM Material and Surfaces for Novel wave phenomena” Univ. of RomaTre, Rome, Italy, 18-22 December 2017;
3. “Extreme Scale Electromagnetic Interaction (EXEMI) school, ESPCI, Paris, France, 19-21 November 2018

Final results

The main objective of this interaction is to disseminate the NTX concept and at the same time enlarging the community of NTX with contribution of other communities; this with the aim to constitute a “NanoEngineering” community to be able to submit a Flagship proposal. Hundred and twenty institutions have been advised about the initiative and have expressed interest in it. A large part of these institutions belong to FORESEEN, SPINTRONICSFACTORY, METAMORPHOSE VI, and SYMETA.

The following short term impact are expected
• Impact on European research competitiveness
• Impact on how to use the electromagnetic spectrum
• Impact on involvement European SME
• Impact on interdisciplinary knowledge
• Impact on training and education

The following exploitation areas of long-term impact are expected
• High data-rate communications: beyond 5G
• Remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS)
• Security Sensors
• Semiconductor Industry
• Space technology Industry
• Robotic industry

Website & more info

More info: http://www.nanoarchitectronics.eu.