In classical micro robotics, highly integrated and specialised robots have been developed in the past years which are able to perform micro manipulations controlled by a central high-level control system. On the other hand, technology is still far away from the first 'artificial ant' which would integrate all capabilities of these simple, yet highly efficient swarm building insects.This has been the motivation of other research fields focusing on studying such swarm behaviour and transferring it to simulation or physical robot agents. Realisations of small robot groups of 10 to 20 robots are capable to mimic some aspects of such social insects, however, the employed robots are usually huge compared to their natural counterparts, and very limited in terms of perception, manipulation and co-operation capabilities.The proposed project aims to take a leap forward in robotics research by combining experts in both fields, micro robotics and distributed multi agent systems. The project aims at technological advances to facilitate the mass-production of micro robots which can then be employed as a 'real' swarm consisting of up to 1,000 robot clients. These clients will all be equipped with limited, pre-rational on-board intelligence. The swarm will consist of a huge number of heterogeneous robots, differing in the type of sensors, manipulators and computational power. Such a robot swarm is expected to perform a variety of applications,including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks. Building on a large expertise in micro robot technologies, the project addresses topics like polymer actuators, collective perception, using (instead of fighting) micro scaling effects, artificial and collective intelligence. All the competencies required are available within the consortium. The project results will enable humans to further understand the micro world, bridge the gap between micro and nano technologies and be the stepping stone to a 'real artificial ant'.

Sleep loss, excessive fatigue, stress and inattention constitute the social diseases of our century. Within the '24 hour society' people tend more and more to exchange sleep and serenity for gain or pleasure. This gradually leads to an excessive rate of sleep disorders, roughly 20% of the population suffer from one, at least mildly or temporarily, as well as to a boom of stress and anxiety related diseases. In addition, a significant percentage of severe traffic and industrial accidents seem to be caused by the involuntary human transition from wakefulnessto sleep or by prolonged inattention. SENSATION aims to explore a wide range of micro and nano sensor technologies, with the aim to achieve unobtrusive, cost-effective, real-time monitoring, detection and prediction of human physiological state in relation to wakefulness, fatigue and stress anytime, everywhere and for everybody.Thus, the different states of human brain are analysed within SubProjectl. Big databases with recordings of normal and involuntary (during task-execution) transition from wakefulness to sleep from hundreds of people will be created to serve as development and reference basis. In Subproject 2, 17 micro sensors and 2 nano sensors are developed. They include brain monitoring, wearable, eye-related posture and motility and autonomie functions sensors; all wirelessly integrated through a body/local/wide area network. These sensors are combined into medical systems for medical diagnosis and treatment within Subproject 3. They will be also integrated in a system for operator's hypovigilance detection and prediction, to be used in various industrial operations and environments within Subproject 4. The overall IP is coordinated by a series of cross-project activities within Subproject 5, which cover management, training, system architecture, dissemination, evaluation, exploitation, user awareness enhancement, standardisation, ethical and legal issues.

IntelliDrug is aimed at developing an intelligent micro- and nano- system to provide an alternative approach for the treatment of addiction and chronic diseases. Chronic diseases and Drug addiction are among the most severe human problems, the latter being a major motive of crime and social instability. The continuous and endless efforts required from treating personnel and the afflicted persons further compromise the quality of life and give rise to severe compliance problems with therapy. In addition, limited effectiveness and adverse side effects are the result of the currently used medication administration methods. The proposed project IntelliDrug is aimed at obviating these problems. The proposed innovation will be reached by developing an intraoral micro-system, which contains a medication replacement reservoir and releases the medication in a controlled, intelligent manner according to the patient needs, in periods lasting days, weeks or months. The device will be reloaded in a simple non-invasive way. The micro-system comprises a medication release mechanism, a built-in intelligence, micro-sensors and micro-actuators, and a remote control. This project explores the application potential of micro-nano technology and investigates the integration technologies required to establish the nano to macro interface and to have 'nano' interact with the ambient. IntelliDrug deals with research and development of key technologies, such as biosensors and secure communication, low volume controlled drug handling, and the component integration into wearable systems, to manage health status. The resulting micro-system will help afflicted persons to put an end to their personal misery, to run a life as close as possible to normal and even to turn into a productive member of our society. It also will contribute to strengthen European research, cooperation and industry.

For future generation electronic circuits a severe bottleneck is expected on the global interconnect level. One of the most promising solutions is the use of an optical interconnect layer. Therefore, PICMOS will demonstrate the feasibility of adding a photonic interconnect layer on top of silicon ICs. This interconnect layer will be fabricated by a combination of wafer bonding and wafer-scale processing steps. It will be planar and will be built from a high-density passive optical wiring circuit integrated with InP-based sources and detectors using a wafer bonding approach. Two different integration strategies will be investigated: a wafer-to-wafer bond technology where the photonic interconnect layer is fabricated in parallel with the electronic circuits wafer and where both wafers are subsequently bonded together and an above-IC approach where the interconnect layer is fabricated directly on top of the electronic circuits. For the first approach, SOI-waveguides allowing for very high-density wiring will be developed. For the above-IC approach, an innovative type of high-contrast polymer waveguides compatible with CMOS back-end processing will be developed. Both types of waveguides will be fabricated using standard CMOS-processing techniques. The III-V epi material for the active photonic devices will be bonded on top of the waveguide circuits and the substrate will be removed. The active devices will be defined in the remaining membrane. In all fabrication steps, only waferscale technologies will be employed with the only exception made for the bonding of the III-V semiconductor material. Because of the large size difference between silicon and InP wafers and the limited space occupied by the active photonic devices, a rapid die-to-wafer bonding step will be developed for this step. In parallel with the technological oriented work, system studies will define application domains for PICMOS and generic parameter specifications for all subcomponents.

Things that think and the communication of people with such things in his environment critically depend oncontactless communication technologies. RF communication devices and protocols have been developed in thepast and exist today, yet in their present form they cannot and will never be used on a large scale to allowcommunication with everyday objects. The fundamental reason for this is the cost of the silicon technologyemployed to realize it. Even in its most optimistic projection, this cost remains at least one order of magnitudehigher than the cost of a technology that has been proven to be truly ubiquitously applicable, such as a barcode.Therefore, a new generation of devices is required to enable ambient intelligence at the right cost point in orderto be truly applicable everywhere and anywhere.The objective of PolyApply is to lay the foundations of a scalable and ubiquitously applicablecommunication technology. The boundary condition is the cost of the microsystem, combining basic RFcommunication with sensor functions. The key to achieving a fundamentally different cost point than what will bereachable in the future with the evolution of the existing technologies (e.g. CMOS), is to resolutely move to adisruptive new manufacturing technology: going from batch processing to in-line manufacturing technology.The semiconductor system envisaged to this end is based on polymers. The scalable aspect refers to the factthat PolyApply does not plan to propose a solution for a certain generation of RF communication devices usefulat one point in time, but rather intends to develop generic technologies with a meaningful impact in the mid- andlong term. In other words, the developed technologies will lead to an extendable family of products, ranging from'simple' RF tags at ultra-low cost to RF communication devices with complex functionality such as integrated re-writable memory, sensory inputs, display, etc...

The approach of the information society has resulted in a tremendous increase in thevolume of wireless communication often giving rise to bottle-necks in the communicationsystems. To alleviate this congestion there is pressure to widen the allocated frequencybands up to millimetre wavelengths and to have terminals that are able to support manystandards. It is understood that conventional components and solutions have limitationsthat will make it difficult to fulfil these requirements. The last five years has seen theemergence of a technology, RF and microwave MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), thatseeks to overcome these limitations. In this new technology mechanical and electricalfunctions are combined to improve the performance of existing devices, allow on-waferdevice integration and the creation of completely new device systems called Advanced MEMSfor RF and Millimeterwave Communications 'AMICOM' .A consortium has been assembled that believes the merging MEMS technologies with 1Ctechnologies will lead to advanced microsystems that can operate over very broad-bandfrequency ranges. The microsystems will feature innovative functionalities, such ascircuit redundancy, reconfigurability and power management. To realise this microsystemconcept, research and collaboration in many different fields is required including!fabrication technology, materials, electromagnetics, mechanics, thermal and electricalmodelling, characterisation, packaging and reliability.We believe that a Network of Excellence is the most appropriate vehicle with whichto assemble and integrate the isolated competences that exist around Europe in thisfield. In this way a powerful research body will be created that can compete withthe United States and Japan. The idea is to give to the industrial partners accessto a large and transparent body of European competence to help them to enhancetheir competitiveness.

The aim of TARGET is to overcome the fragmentation of European research in the field of microwave power amplifiers for broadband wireless access by creating a progressive and durable integration of research capacities of the network partners. Ultimately, European technology and research in the fields of active power devices beyond CMOS, of the characterisation and simulation of materials and devices, of amplifier design and linearisation, and in the field of broadband transmitter system design shall attain a leading role in the world. This challenge has been rightly acknowledged by the European Commission in making 'Pushing the limits of CMOS and preparing for Post-CMOS' a strategic objective of the IST work programme 2003-2004.TARGET will bring together 45 top amplifier research groups consisting of 168 researchers and 67 doctoral students (coming from 12 EU member countries, 3 candidate countries, and 2 associated countries) that have in the past three years published more than 1000 papers. This integration will be pursued with the aim to - create a co-operative network- establish a virtual centre of excellence- stimulate and co-ordinate world-class research.TARGET will follow a well-designed methodology to integrate research in this field. As a general principle, it will use research itself for the purpose of achieving a desire to integrate among the participants. A total of 26 work packages in the fields of integration, joint research, dissemination of knowledge, and of network management are defined for the first 18 month period. To account for the special needs and interests of female researchers a gender action plan is foreseen.Over the four years funding period an average funding rate of only 2,000,000 ? per year is requested. To prepare for time after community support, TARGET will submit itself to an annually decreasing budget so that there will be need for the network to achieve its own financing.

With the scaling of successive generations of CMOS technologies, further scaling of the different memory types(DRAM, Flash, FeRAM, MRAM) is no longer feasible due to physical and/or cost limitations. Furthermore, theprocesses for various types of memories on CMOS are increasing in complexity and as a result becomingmutually exclusive. This threatens the further scaling of systems-on-chip, on which several memory types(SRAM, DRAM, Flash, ...) often must be integrated simultaneously.As a result, there is a very strong driving force to develop novel memory concepts world-wide. The purpose is tofind materials and concepts that re-unite the following 5 major characteristics : (1 ) scalable for at least severalgenerations from the 45 nm CMOS node on; (2) non-volatile; (3) fast (ns and less) intrinsic switchingmechanism; (4) the technology and materials must be compatible with present-day and future generations ofCMOS; (5) a single and simple technological platform to produce a single unified memory cell should allow togenerate memories with various characteristics by variation of the memory architecture in which such cell isembedded.The present consortium groups two European semiconductor manufacturers, who have, for differentapplications, performed several years of research to screen and preselect candidate memory cells and materials.This strong background allows the consortium to focus on a limited number of two most promising options: oneorganic charge transfer material cell, and one ferro-electric Schottky barrier memory cell.The purpose of the research is to assess the performance and validate the possibility to implement cross-pointmemory cells based on these two options in standard backend-of-line CMOS processes and to demonstrate a reliable and scalable new memory cell concept with cell size down to 4 F�, where F is half the minimum metal pitch.

Although the margin with regard to other parts of the world is getting smaller, European microsystem technologyis still leading and is one of the future economic domains with great potential and impact on almost all areas oftechnological development. A major reason for this success is the large variety of different microsystem processtechnologies as most of the target devices such as MEMS and MOEMS require an application specificfabrication process. To keep and to extend the margin of European microsystem technology the PROMENADEproject adds to reproducibility, manageability and time to market issues related to the maintenance ofmicrosystem processes.Today technology information derived from simulation, tests or measurements is usually kept informally and non-systematically on paper, in Excel sheets or merely in the heads of process engineers and is hence hardlyaccessible for use in future process development projects.The objectives of the PROMENADE project are to realise a computer-based environment supporting processengineers in creating, verifying, simulating, optimising and maintaining thin film Si processes with predictablecharacteristics as well as designers of micro devices by offering them a formal interface to constraints from thetechnological domain and facilitating design for manufacturing. Special attention will be paid to respect IPRprotection issues of users / partners and company specific IPR protection.A major part of the effort will be related to the generation of the simulation environment, implementing thedeveloped empirical and physical models generated by the detailed physical study. Single process stepsimulations and characterisations as well as simulations of complete process sequences will be available toderive rules forming the foundation for process validation as well as process assessment.The system is founded on a common database, industry leading TCAD (Technology CAD) tools and text truncated for the purposes of the ES

The 'nano' field encompasses scientific investigations and experimental processes relevant to structuresand objects with at least one dimension much smaller than micrometers in size, down to single living cells,molecules, and atoms. It reveals a major interdisciplinary trend that clearly ranges from far upstream in physics,computation and biology, where the manipulation of single entities or of small collections of atoms is oftenreferred to as nanosciences, to industry, where the continuing trend towards miniaturization is bringing downprocesses developed for microelectronics to the nanoscale, a domain referred to as nanotechnology. Nowadays,nanoscience technology is hardly taught in academic courses at universities and text books on the subject are stillrare. A knowledge transfer from scientists currently engaged in the field towards younger ones is thus essential.The forum 'NanoSciencesTech' is a coherent series of four schools and one conference in the field ofnanosciences and nanotechnologies. The domains have been selected among those strongly impacted by the nanofield: condensed matter, optics and biology. The specific hot topics addressed by 'NanoSciencesTech' areNanophotonics, Self-organized Nanostructures, Nanomagnetism and Spintronics, Nanotubes, andNanobio-Objects. We expect an attendance of about 400 young researchers from Europe and third countries. Acoherent training will be provided by talented academic and industrial lecturers going from the basics in eachfield to the latest fundamental breakthroughs and most promising applications. In addition, dedicated sessions inthe events will address intersections with the other schools and fields. For example, the bases of nano-instruments for probing nano-objects, nano-fabrication tools or computational nanoscience, will be addressed ina coordinated way by the various events. To our knowledge, the forum 'NanoSciencesTech' is a 'première' atthe European le#