/  June 08, 2013, 04:00 pm - 12:00 am

Long Night of the Sciences 2013

As Clean as Clean Can Be – Welcome to the Cleanroom!

Where do the chips in a mobile phone, camera or pacemaker come from?
Watch as scientists mount tiny components sized just a few thousandths of a millimeter on large silicon wafers and then saw these into individual microchips. We’ll be providing you with cleanroom garb to ensure not a single speck of dust impedes the chip reliability.

Disposable Endoscopes - How Microelectronics Is Revolutionizing Medical Engineering

Of all industry sectors, medical engineering probably benefits most from the integration of intelligent electronics. One of our exhibits at this year’s Long Night of the Sciences is the world’s smallest camera, which was developed specifically for endoscopes. Especially kids will get a kick out of it – we’ll be setting it up as an interactive game, in which one visitor operates the endoscopic camera, while the other performs microinvasive surgery to remove an “accidently swallowed” foreign object from a “patient”.

Treasure in the Gaming Console

Visitors will get a close-up view of a gaming console’s internal workings and learn all about scarce resources in electronics via a touchscreen display. How e-books can replace paper is another topic. Potential savings, but also possible negative effects on the environment (so-called boomerang effects), will be illustrated, again using a touchscreen display.

Smart Textiles for Style and Function

Electronics in textiles is no longer sci-fi. LEDs give evening wear that extra bit of sparkle, large-surface sensor materials ensure more safety in buildings. At Long Night of the Sciences, Fraunhofer IZM will be presenting different examples of smart textiles from its TexLab. Exhibits include a paper-textile-sound installation, with which visitors can make their own soundscapes by interacting with fabrics that have integrated conductive materials.

Tablet Busted? What Happens Next?

Where do broken tablet computers go when they have served their purpose? Fraunhofer IZM scientists are investigating how “repairable” different types of tablets are. How should a tablet be manufactured so that a faulty individual component can be easily replaced and the device can be comprehensively recycled at the end of its lifetime? Using disassembled tablet computers, we will show which build features make a table particularly environmentally friendly.