Recent developments in the design and synthesis of nanoscale building blocks as active elements in opto- or bio-electronic devices with tailored electronic functionality have the potential to open up new horizons in nanoscience and also revolutionise multi-billion dollar markets across multiple technology sectors including healthcare, printable electronics, and security. Ligand-stabilised inorganic nanocrystals (~2-30 nm core diameters) and functional organic molecules are attractive building blocks due to their size dependent opto-electronic properties, the availability of low-cost synthesis processes and the potential for formation of ordered structures via (bio) molecular recognition and self-assembly. Harnessing the complementary properties of both nanocrystals and functional molecules thus represents a unique opportunity for generation of new knowledge and development of new classes of high knowledge-content materials with specific functionality tailored for key applications, e.g., printable electronics, biosensing or energy conversion in the medium term, and radically new information and signal processing paradigms in the long term. Self-assembly and self-organisation processes offer the potential to achieve dimensional control of novel multifunctional materials at length scales not accessible to conventional “top-down” technologies based on lithography. It is critical for European industry to develop new knowledge and low-cost, scaleable processes for assembly and electrical interfacing of these multifunctional materials with conventional contact electrodes in order to produce into tailored devices and products, in particular on low-cost substrates. The FUNMOL consortium will deliver substantial innovation to European industry via development of cost-effective, scaleable processes for directed assembly of high-knowledge content nanocrystal-molecule materials into electrically-interfaced devices at silicon oxide, glass and plastic substrates.

The overall aim of the NANOSENS project is to upgrade the research and innovation capacity of the National Institute of Research and Development for Technical Physics (NIRDTP) to the highest European level in microsensors for medical applications and biosensors based on magnetic nanoparticles and nanowires. NIRDTP is a very promising European research organisation in the fields of nanoscience and microsystems. The Institute has a total staff of 73 persons (researchers and administrative). NIRDTP's existing scientific expertise and facilities will be further developed through a range of research and innovation capacity building activities derived from NIRDTP's SWOT analysis. The activities will increase NIRDTP's visibility, society/regional responsiveness and innovation potential for the most advanced topics of microsensors and biosensors: Research Topic A: Microsensors for Medical Applications A1. Acoustic microsensors based on nano- and microwires for medical applications; A2. Implantable magnetic microsensors based on nanostructured materials for medical applications; Research Topic B: Biosensors based on Nanoparticles and Barcode Nanowires B1. Sensors based on nanosized detection elements for applications in nanomedicine; B2. Biosensors based on multilayered nanowires for the detection of biomolecules. Central to the activities are twinning partnerships with six specialist research organisations: 1. Sheffield Centre for Advanced Magnetic Materials and Devices within the Department of Engineering Materials, University of Sheffield, UK (SCAMMD); 2. Department of Materials for Information Technologies in the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, Spain (ICMM-CSIC); 3. Siemens Corporate Technology, Erlangen, Germany (SIEMENS); 4. Nanobioelectronics & Biosensors Group in the Institut Català de Nanotecnologia, Barcelona, Spain (ICN); 5. Solid State Physics group within the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK (UGLA); 6. Materials Science Electron Microscopy Department at the University of Ulm, Germany (UULM). NIRDTP will increase its human potential by hiring seven experienced researchers, one IP manager and one Innovation Manager, as well as organising know-how exchanges and trainings for existing and new staff with twinning partners. NIRDTP will increase its technology potential by purchasing a scanning Auger nanoprobe equipment, upgrading its RF sputtering equipment with laser ablation capabilities, and purchasing a gel electrophoresis system. Finally, to ensure its research quality and innovation capability, NIRDTP will be ex-post evaluated by a team of international, independent experts nominated by the Commission.

CATHERINE will provide a new unconventional concept for local and chip-level interconnects that will bridge ICT beyond the limits of CMOS technology._x000d_

Today, markets demand smaller, cheaper, energy friendly and more different consumer products. Last decades micro technology has opened possibilities for mobile communication, safety and health science products. To meet these demands, the industry is encountering technological barriers that prevent the industry from evolving from the micro to a nanotechnology era. To resolve these barriers, the industry and research institutes need to initiate research programmes, and need to structure and integrate its research programmes and transfer the knowledge that as been acquired in these programmes. “New” researchers have to be trained with excellent research skills, knowledge on the specific technology, and understanding of market demands, application development, and so on. For this purpose 4 industrial, 5 academic and 3 research institutes have defined the 4 year SPAM research and training program; “a Supra-disciplinary approach to research and training in surface Physics for Advanced Manufacturing - SPAM”. Research objectives are: • identify and develop crucial knowledge in the field of surface physics, • enable the manufacturing of smaller semi-conductors and hence technology to print under 32 nm; extreme positional accuracy (< 4 nm); at competitive cost, • use this knowledge to further develop lithography technologies/tools needed for cost efficient development of nano-electronic devices, including manufacturing processes. Training objectives are: • provide personalised individual training, in particular for 16 ESR but also for 6 ER, to prepare and optimise their research in SRTs, with the help of 9 VS. • provide a network-wide training, fully exploiting the network potential and complementarities, leading to 12 network events. • transfer existing knowledge between partners through the SRTs and to transfer newly gained knowledge. Meeting the objectives are the responsibility of 4 Supra-disciplinary Research Teams (SRT) and 5 interlinking Training Exchange Pools.

An innovative mechano-chemical approach (based on the high energy ball milling) will be used for the development of innovative nanopolymers to be used in Rapid Manufacturing (RM) based on Selective Laser Sintering (SLS),by: 1.Structural modification (up nanopolymers stage) using a currently widely used polymer like Polyammide PA (a 'nanoPA' will be produced); 2.Alloying (at nanoscale) with different polymers to tune mechanical properties; 3.Nanocharging of polymers (development of nanocomposites). Moving from this background, the project will make a real, LARGE, step up in polymers and composites properties by including nano features into the base materials and the final products. The final products will benefit from radically extended performances (i.e. operating temperatures, increased strength). In this way it will be possible, using existing prototyping machines, to realize freeform manufacturing technologies for the direct automated and customised production of parts and products from small to medium size batches for a wide range of possible applications (from vehicle applications to biomedical devices). The following are the project S/T objectives of SLS materials and parts produced using the modified PA -New nanostructured materials based on Poliammides (PA) -Agglomerated (scale of 20-50 micron) nanophased (scale of 10-20 nm) particles suited for RM via SLS -Properties improvements in materials and RM/SLS parts properties (referred to conventional PA) of more than 200%. -Parts having improved properties and wider application window for automotive sector, consumer goods and medical instrumentation. For these reasons STEPUP responds quite well to the call topics by: introducing new concepts for the micro/nano fabrication (usage of nanoplymers); enabling transition of RM to customised solutions integrating materials design and simulations.

The objective of the project is to realise high-performance organic electronic devices and circuits using large-area processing compatible fabrication methods. The high performance of the organic circuits referred to here means high speed (kHz-MHz range), low parasitic capacitance, low operating voltage, and low power consumption. The related organic thin film transistor (OTFT) fabrication development will be focused to enable a high resolution nanoimprinting lithography (NIL) step, which is compatible with roll-to-roll processing environment. Applying NIL will enable smaller transistor channel lengths (down below 1 µm) and thereby an increase in the speed of the device. Another important concept to improve the performance is the self-aligned fabrication principle, in which the critical patterns of the different OTFT layers are automatically aligned in respect to each other during the fabrication. This decreases the parasitic capacitances and thereby increases the speed of the device, and is one of the key elements to enable the use of large-area fabrication techniques such as printing. Also complementary transistor technology will be developed, which will enable a decrease in operating voltage and power consumption. The high performance organic transistors will be tested in basic electronic building blocks such as inverters and ring oscillators. The technology development will be exploited in the active matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) and radio-frequency identification (RFID) demonstrators. In addition to showing that sufficient performance can be reached without sacrificing the mass fabrication approach, solutions for the fabrication of roll-to-roll tools in order to make serial replication viable will be provided. Finally, the design, characterization, and modeling of submicron low-power OTFTs will be done in order to support the fabrication of the demonstrators based on the technology developed in the project.

The EAgLE project aims at establishing at the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFPAN) a leading multiprofile research Centre for designing and fabricating new materials, their characterization and testing under extreme experimental conditions. The Centre will identify and select novel materials, structures, phenomena, and computational protocols for functional new-concept nanodevices.

Three-dimensional large area metamaterials, especially Negative Index Materials (NIMs) promise to enable numerous novel and breakthrough applications like perfect lenses and cloaking devices, not only but especially if they exhibit the desired properties in the visible frequency range. For the European Photonics industry it is of paramount importance enabling fabricating such materials as soon as possible, to maintain its important position in the areas of optical components and systems as well as production technologies. Till now such materials have not been produced, yet - neither in 3D nor on large areas, let alone both combined. The aim of NIM_NIL is the development of a production process for 3D NIMs in the visible regime combining UV-based Nanoimprint Lithography (UV-NIL) on wafer scale using the new material graphene and innovative geometrical designs. This project will go beyond state-of-the-art in three important topics regarding NIMs: the design, the fabrication using Nanoimprintlithography (NIL) and the optical characterization by ellipsometry. New designs and the new material Graphene will be investigated to extend the existing frequency limit of 900 nm into the visible regime. The fabrication method of choice is UV-NIL since it allows cost efficient large area nanostructuring, which is indispensible if materials like NIMs should be produced on large scale. The negative refraction will be measured using ellipsometry which is a fast and non-destructive method to control the fabrication process. At the end of the project a micro-optical prism made from NIM will be fabricated to directly verify and demonstrate the negative refractive index. Each aspect of innovation within NIM_NIL -design, fabrication and characterisation of NIMs -is represented by experts in this field resulting in a multidisciplinary highly motivated consortium containing participants from basic research as well as industrial endusers from whole Europe.

WADIMOS proposes to develop a generic technology for the realization of complex electro-photonic integrated ICs using standard CMOS processing technologies. These ICs will contain a photonic interconnect layer incorporating microsource arrays and ultracompact WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) functionality based on silicon nanophotonic wire circuits, driven directly from by the CMOS electronic circuitry. The photonic interconnect layer is intended to be incorporated in between the uppermost copper layers of an electronic IC. The availability of such ICs will benefit many applications in telecom, local access, datacom, automotives, avionics and sensing, on- and off-chip interconnect. Two applications will be investigated in particular: a 100TB/s datalink for a maskless-lithography tool based on a massively parallel e-beam tool and an optical network-on-chip based on a wavelength routed network directly integrated with CMOS circuits. The latter is addressing the expected limitations imposed by future purely electrical interconnects in complex MPSoC systems. These two applications are each backed by an industrial partner and their architectural design will be studied in separate workpackages, resulting in a set of specifications for the subcomponents forming the electro-photonic IC. Based on these inputs the different subcomponents will be designed, fabricated and characterized. The most relevant subcomponent is a III-V silicon heterogeneous multi-wavelength microsource array, which will be realized fully in a CMOS-pilot line, based on a process previously developed by project partners and independently by INTEL/USCB researchers. Finally, the different subcomponents will be integrated into two demonstrators each addressing one of both applications under study.

The NaPANIL project aims to develop processes, materials and tools, both for manufacturing and for control, for truly 3-dimensional nanosurfaces with feature dimensions ranging from 50 nm to several m. The nanosurfaces will be realised using various variants of nanoimprinting lithography. The dedicated application is to control light at nanostructured surfaces and a few potential high impact products have been identified by the end-user partners in the consortium. Design, demonstration and prototyping these applications will act as test-bench for the new manufacturing paradigm. The manufacturing processes possess generic aspects for production of any kind of topographically 3-dimensional nanostructured surfaces. In the R&D of nanoimprinting Europe has a leading position. The NaPANIL consortium combines the best expertise and know how in field to reach the goals in the project.