Tech News

Can consumers in the EU rely on electronic products meeting high environmental standards in the future? According to a regulation on the ecodesign of sustainable products, which will be voted on this Thursday in the European Parliament, this will soon no longer be a dream of the future. Sustainability specialists from Intel, Google, Apple and Microsoft will be discussing these and other committed climate targets beyond the EU with over 300 expected participants at the "Electronics Goes Green 2024" conference in Berlin from June 18 to 20.

Overheating components significantly limit the performance of drivetrains in electric vehicles. Inverters in particular are subject to a high thermal load, which is why they have to be actively cooled. In the Dauerpower project, Fraunhofer IZM is working with project partners from the automotive industry to develop an electric inverter that can work at a lower operating temperature thanks to optimized cooling management, resulting in a lower power loss. In addition to longer full-load utilization, the required semiconductor area can also be reduced as a result, which can further decrease the costs of the electric mobility transition.

How do Germany’s mobile communications networks fare in terms of their environmental impact? This question was investigated in a new Fraunhofer IZM study that models the carbon footprint of creating and using current and future mobile communications networks.

More than 2,500 innovations were in the running for the exclusive „Product of the Year 2024“ award, chosen by the readers of the trade magazine „Elektronik“. From the many contenders for the prize, a novel impendance spectroscopy cable developed by Fraunhofer IZM was picked as the third product of the year, coming hot on the heels of innovations entered by Bosch and Infineon.

A new European Union consortium created to accelerate the development of next-generation, edge-AI technologies is installing cleanroom tools and gearing up to design, evaluate, test and fabricate new circuits from across Europe.

When Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are used to survey industrial buildings, map terrain, or transport cargo for the logistics sector, they need to be as lightweight as possible, but carry the greatest possible payload. Fraunhofer IZM has developed a compact and lightweight navigation unit (IMU) for such drones, which enables centimeter-perfect accuracy that was previously unattainable for civilian applications.

Fraunhofer IZM has been awarded the coveted "Excellence in Vocational Training" seal by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Berlin (CCI Berlin). The Institute not just passed all of the required standard criteria, but also excelled in the supplementary categories and excellence criteria – testimony to the Institute’s long-standing commitment to high-class vocational training and apprenticeships.

Continuing last year’s whistle stop tour of Fraunhofer sites in southern Germany, the society’s new president, Professor Holger Hanselka, has come to Saxony to visit the institutes in and around the state capital of Dresden. Fraunhofer IZM-ASSID invited him into its cleanroom to experience the strong partnership between industry and research that the site has been known for in the last 15 years.

Space comes at a premium on electronic chips: Powerful electronics need more and more connections, crammed into smaller and smaller spaces. Established technologies are reaching the limits of what is physically possible. Now, researchers at Fraunhofer IZM-ASSID have teamed up with other partners to level up a connection technology patented by NanoWired GmbH that uses wires at a nanometer scale. The team demonstrated how the novel technology could be used in the industrial production of 300 mm wafers.

The use of glass as substrate in electronics manufacturing enables the additional transmission of optical signals through the substrate material. This allows much higher rates of data transmission, which is vital for many scenarios like automotive, telecommunication, or AI applications. Researchers at Fraunhofer IZM have now managed to develop a system that can automatically measure propagation losses in integrated optical waveguides, all part of the research project “Integrated Electro-Photonic Panel Systems” (EPho).