Tech News

Imagine a scenario where you simply just throw in a pill to identify an error—this is now one step closer to reality thanks to the work done by researchers at Fraunhofer IZM in cooperation with Micro Systems Technologies (MST) and Sensry GmbH. As small as a piece of candy, the waterproof IoT sensor can reliably measure the properties of liquids even in hard-to-reach places. This can make the maintenance of industrial machines much easier and even help to identify diseases.

The digital world is booming and has long since become part of everyday life in industry and society. More recent developments such as autonomous driving, telemedicine, but also private use require ever higher rates to transmit large amounts of data in real time. 6G should help with this: The aim is to transmit 1,000 GB/s and reduce latency to a tenth compared to 5G. At the current development stage, Fraunhofer IZM is working together with partners on researching a reliable hardware system for the mobile communications of tomorrow.

Open your garage door by smartphone. Dim your lights with a simple swipe. Control your home’s heating on your way back from the office: More and more aspects of our lives are governed by smart, connected electronic devices. Many functions can be controlled and information shared only if the hardware works seamlessly with the operating systems under the hood. When a product is purchased, the buyer typically expects it to work for as long as possible. But what if it stops working even if the hardware is still fine? In a study commis-sioned by the German Environment Agency, Fraunhofer IZM and its partners explored the mechanisms behind software obsolescence to come up with practical recommendations for political decision makers.

Recognizing when senior citizens are at risk in the home or helping them find misplaced objects they presumed lost: The technology developed in the successful OMNICONNECT project can help people lead independent lives for longer. The researchers of Fraunhofer IZM have integrated a miniature radar system into an LED ceiling light that can track and recognize movement patterns and locate people or objects in a room.

With the approval of the Senate Chairmen and the Scientific and Technical Council of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Prof. Martin Schneider-Ramelow has received and accepted the appointment committee’s call to be the director of Fraunhofer IZM. Concluding the appointment process, Martin Schneider-Ramelow has now been entrusted with the leadership of Fraunhofer IZM as one of the world's leading research institutes in the field of microelectronics.

Atomic clocks guarantee unrivalled precision when it comes to tracking time. They help us keep our digital and analogue clocks running on time by measuring the atomic resonance in cesium atoms exposed to microwave radiation. A new generation of optical atomic clocks is now set to increase their precision by a factor of up to 100,000 by measuring higher frequencies in the near IR and visible light range.

High-performance computing, or HPC, has become a key method in many scientific areas, including pharmaceutical and climate research. However, data centres with energy-intensive supercomputers produce quite a bit of CO2. ‘Energy-optimised supercomputer networks using wind energy’ (‘Energieoptimierte Supercomputer-Netzwerke durch die Nutzung von Windenergie’, ESN4NW) is the title of a new, nationwide joint project headed by the SICP – Software Innovation Campus Paderborn at Pader-born University.

A newly launched European research project intends to establish an agile, economical, and energy efficient technology framework for photonic integrated circuits (PIC) that have the potential to revolutionize the Next Generation Central Office (NGCO) ecosystem with capacities of 51.2 terabits per second and more. The proposed gamechanger: a reconfigurable optically activated backplane and novel toolkit for photonic transceivers.

IZM scientist Ivan Ndip has accepted an appointment as full professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU). Since February, he has been head of the Chair of Antennas and High-Frequency System Integration at BTU.

Quantum computers are highly energy-efficient and extremely powerful supercomputers. But for these machines to realize their full potential in new applications like artificial intelligence or machine learning, researchers are hard at work at perfecting the underlying electronics to process their calculations. A team at Fraunhofer IZM are working on superconducting connections that measure a mere ten micrometers in thickness, moving the industry a substantial step closer to a future of commercially viable quantum computers.