ECSEL Projects

StorAIge: "Embedded storage elements on next MCU generation ready for AI on the edge"

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2020-1-IA, it counts 40 european partners, three are Italian: IUNET, STM Italia and Politecnico di Torino.

Funding: JU share € 255.785,63 - National share under negotiation € 243.610,94

IU.NET third parties involved: Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Politecnico di Milano. IUNET Scientific Manager is Prof. Daniele Ielmini.

The main objective of the storAIge project is the development and industrialization of FDSOI 28nm and next generation embedded Phase Change Memory (ePCM) world-class semiconductor technologies, allowing the prototyping of high performance, Ultra low power and secured & safety System on Chip (SoC) solutions enabling competitive Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Edge applications. The main challenge addressed by the project is on one hand to handle the complexity of sub-28nm ‘more than moore’ technologies and to bring them up at a high maturity level and on the other hand to handle the design of complex SoCs for more intelligent, secure, flexible, low power consumption and cost effective. The project is targeting chipset and solutions with very efficient memories and high computing power targeting 10 Tops per Watt. The development of the most advanced automotive microcontrollers in FDSOI 28nm ePCM will be the support technology to demonstrate the high performances path as well as the robustness of the ePCM solution. The next generation of FDSOI ePCM will be main path for general purpose advanced microcontrollers usable for large volume Edge AI application in industrial and consumer markets with the best compromise on three requirements: performances, low power and adequate security. On top of the development and industrialization of silicon process lines and SoC design, storAIge will also address new design methodologies and tools to facilitate the exploitation of these advanced technology nodes, particularly for high performance microcontrollers having AI capabilities. Activities will be performed to setup robust and adequate Security and Safety level in the final applications, defining and implementing the good ‘mixture’ and tradeoff between HW and SW solutions to speed up adoption for large volume applications.

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2020-1-IA, it counts 36 european partners, thirteen are Italian, such as Ferrari S.p.A., Enel X, STM Italia and CNR.

Coordinator: Distretto Tecnologico Sicilia Micro e Nano Sistemi S.c.a.r.l.
Eng. Leoluca Liggio

Funding: JU share € 770.000 - National share under negotiation € 700.000

IU.NET third parties involved: Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Università della Calabria, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, università degli Studi di Padova. IUNET Scientific Manager is Prof. Alessandro Chini.

GaN4AP has the ambitious goal of making gallium nitride (GaN)-based electronics the primary technology for active devices in all power conversion systems. A pervasive use of GaN electronics will allow the possibility of developing power electronic systems with energy losses close to zero, an objective that is perfectly in line with the Energy Efficiency Directive (2012/27 / EU) of the European Commission which literally quotes the following "... making better use of energy – through the organisation and modernisation of our buildings, energy and transport systems and industrial processes, kicking off the energy efficiency market, using new services, technologies, materials and financing instruments and promoting behavioural change." Concretely, the project GaN4AP aims at the development of innovative power electronic systems, the development of innovative material, the development of a new generation of Vertical Power Devices based on GaN and the development of new intelligent and integrated GaN solutions (STi2GaN) both in System in Package (SiP) and with monolithic solutions. The development of these new technologies of innovative power supply devices and circuits, using GaN-based devices, is a crucial factor for the global competitiveness of EU industries. The support of the research activities in this project will allow us to lay the foundations for the production of next-generation power electronics technology in Europe and the world.

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2020-1-IA, it counts 30 european partners, four are Italian: IUNET, Applied Materials, Luna Geber Engineering, RO Technology.

Funding: JU share € 537.892,95 - National share under negotiation € 515.856,25

IU.NET third parties involved: Università di Perugia, Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Università di Udine, Politecnico di Torino. IUNET Scientific Manager is Prof. Luca Roselli.

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2020-1-IA-two-stage, it counts 35 european partners, three are Italian: IUNET, HPE srl e STMicroelectronics srl

IU.NET third parties involved: Alma Mater Università di Bologna, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia. IUNET Scientific Manager is Prof. Claudio Fiegna.

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2020-2-RIA-two-stage, it counts 23 european partners, three are Italian: IUNET, Aurel spa e Raw Power srl

Funding: JU part € 225.312,50 National part under negotiation € 216.750,00

IU.NET third parties involved: Università di Padova, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia. IUNET Scientific Manager is il Prof. Paolo Pavan.

YESvGaN will contribute to the development of a new class of vertical GaN power transistors (vGaN) that combines the benefits of transistors built with Wide Band Gap (WBG) materials and vertical structures with the cost advantages introduced by silicon technology. These transistors could replace IGBTs and thus reduce power conversion losses in many applications where component cost can be critical, from data center power supplies to electric vehicle inverters. YESvGaN is involved in the development of the new technologies required, from wafer and equipment to applications.

a project financed by ECSEL JU - call H2020-ECSEL-2019-2-RIA, it counts 22 european partners, 5 of which are Italian: IUNET, STMicroelectronics, ENELX, Politecnico di Bari, Università degli Studi di Messina.

Project Coordinator: Mr. Holger Schmidt (Infineon, Neubiberg – D)

Duration: 36 mesi, from 01/04/2020 until 31/3/2023

Funding: JU part € 426.580 National contribution under negotiation

IU.NET third parties involved: Università di Bologna, Università di Padova, Università di Pisa, Politecnico di Torino. IUNET Scientific Manager is Prof. Aldo Romani.

Description: PROGRESSUS proposes a next generation smart grid, demonstrated by the application example “smart charging infrastructure” that integrates seamlessly into the already existing concepts of smart grid architectures thus keeping all necessary investments minimal and that will facilitate the accelerated transition by tackling three key challenges. The first challenge is related to power conversion: the objectives include reduction of losses in high power converters (e.g. smart charging and e-mobility), design of novel EV high power chargers with integrated battery storage aiming at reducing the peak power drawn from the grid, and the development of ultra-fast modularised charging stations. The second challgenge involves smart and trustworthy methods for new services and operation of energy supply infrastructure, for increased acceptance by the users and speed of the deployment. The targets include energy management for smart charging infrastructure, microgrids, and high resilience towards distributed denial of service attacks. The third challenge involves innovative metering and gateway components required by the power converters and the smart and trustworthy methods mentioned before, in particular current sensors, trusted electronic hardware elements and appliances, which support value added services.

ADACORSA

ADACORSA: "Airborne data collection on resilient system architectures". It is an ECSEL RIA project with 50 partners, 3 of which are Italian: IFI-IT, IUNET, UNIPR

Coordinator: Dr. Peter Schiefer, (Infineon Technologies AG – Neubiberg, DE)

Duration: 36 months, from 01/05/2020 to 30/04/2023

Funding: JU part € 131.250 National contribution under negotiation

IU.NET units involved: University of Perugia. Internal IUNET coordinator: Prof. Luca Roselli.

Description:

ADACORSA targets to strengthen the European drone industry and increase public and regulatory acceptance of BVLOS (beyond visual line-of-sight) drones, by demonstrating technologies for safe, reliable and secure drone operation in all situations and flight phases. The project will drive research and development of components and systems for sensing, telecommunication and data processing along the electronics value-chain. Additionally, drone lead smart industries with high visibility and place for improvement will be developed which will pave the way for a higher public / industry acceptance of the drone technologies. In particular, ADACORSA will deliver:

a) On the component level, functionally redundant and fail-operational radar and LiDAR sensors as well as 3D cameras. In order to reduce risk, time and costs, the project aims to adapt technologies from the automotive sector to the drone market for these components.

b) On the system level, hardware and software for reliable sensor fusion and data analytics as well as technologies for secure and reliable drone communication using multipath TCP and registration and identification by developing platforms based on eUICCs/eSIM.

c) On an architecture level, fail-operational drone control and investigation a pre-operational Flight Information Management System (FIMS) the integration with CoTS components for Unmanned Air Vehicle Traffic Management System (UTM).

Within the project, 35 physical as well as virtual demonstrators of BLVOS, long-range drone flight shall pave the way toward certifiable systems for future integration of drone operations. ADACORSA's innovations will leverage the expertise of a very strong consortium, comprising world renowned industrial (OEMs, Tier-1, Tier-2 and technology providers) and research partners along the complete aviation, semiconductor and also automotive value chains, providing Europe with a competitive edge in a growing drone and drone technologies market.

CHARM: "Challenging environments tolerant Smart systems for IoT and AI". It is an ECSEL IA project with 38 partners, 4 of which are Italian: AMAT, IUNET, LGE and Quantavis

IU.NET units involved: University of Perugia and Pisa. Internal IUNET coordinator: Prof. Giuseppe Iannaccone.

Digitalization has been identified as one of the key enablers for renewal and competitiveness of European manufacturing industries. However, grasping the digitalization and IoT-related opportunities can be limited by the harsh environmental conditions of the manufacturing processes and end use environments. The ECSEL-IA 2019 project initiative CHARM aims to contribute to solving this problem by developing ECS technologies that tolerate harsh industrial environments. The project concept centres around real industrial challenges from different types of end use industries. The synergies and impacts arise from similarities in technology solutions serving different applications and industry sectors. The CHARM Use Cases include six different industry sectors, majority of them presented by innovative cutting-edge large enterprises that belong to the world-wide market leaders of their own sectors – while most of them being new to the ECSEL ecosystem: mining (Sandvik Mining and Construction Oy, FI), paper mills (Valmet Technologies Oy, FI), machining (Tornos SA, CH), solar panel manufacturing lines (Applied Materials Italia SRL, IT), nuclear power plants maintenance and decommissioning (ÚJV Řež a.s., CZ), and professional digital printing (Océ-Technologies B.V, NL). The planned demonstrators engage these big players with European ECS value chains and showcase capabilities that serve manufacturing industries’ needs at large. The new technologies to be developed include novel multi-gas sensors, robust high temperature and pressure sensors, flexible sensors for paper machine rolls, wireless power transfer systems, connectivity solutions for rotating parts, advanced vision systems, and enablers for autonomous driving. The project consortium includes 12 SMEs, 14 LEs and 12 RTOs, and covers the industrial value chains from simulations, sensors and components to packaging, integration and reliability as well as connectivity, cloud and cyber security solutions.

iRel4.0: "Intelligent Reliability 4.0" is an ECSEL IA project with 79 european partners, 5 of which are Italian: Infineon Technologies Italia Srl, IUNET, LFoundry, Tekne Srl, Università degli Studi dell’Aquila.

IU.NET units involved: Università di Bologna, Università di Padova and Politecnico di Milano. Internal IUNET coordinator: Prof. Enrico Sangiorgi.

The project iRel4.0 influences various aspects of the multi-annual strategic plan (MASP): transport and smart mobility, digital industry, education and healthcare systems, communication, energy sector, production as well as sales and marketing. iRel4.0 will focus on enhancing processes, products and systems along the electronic component and system value chain. It will follow a vertical supply chain oriented approach to execute research and innovation across the entire value chain. iRel4.0 is addressing several main challenges in the field of reliability on component, board and system level focusing on:

iRel40 is all about reliability of electronic hardware. It focuses on the value chain chip-package-board/system, through modeling and simulation, through deepened understanding using physics of failure (PoF) approaches, with new materials, designs for reliability, real time feedbacks in production lines, improved tests, predictive algorithms and the use of all available data to learn faster with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). iRel40 will strengthen the European position in all of these domains and foster the role of European semiconductor solutions across industries. Hence, the explicit focus of iRel4.0 on spills prevention is clearly visible in its defined primary objectives. "Improve the Reliability by reducing the failure rate" and by this iRel4.0 will be a nucleus for a new European reliability expert community, enabling the differentiation in the electronic components and systems (ECS) industry.

ARROWHEAD TOOLS: counting more than 80 partners, it's the larger among all the european projects focused on the innovation of digitalization processes.

Funding: JU part € 997.500 National contribution under negotiation for € 1.068.750

IU.NET units involved: Politecnico di Milano, Università di Bologna, Pisa and Modena e Reggio Emilia.

Description: The project's main goal is to create tools that allow to access to new technologies through an open source dedicated platform to engineer, integrate, validate, maintain and manage systems of systems.

AI4DI: "Artificial Intelligence for Digitizing Industry" is an ECSEL RIA project with 21 european partners, 4 of which are Italian: STM, IUNET, SCM, DPC Control

IU.NET units involved: Università di Bologna and Politecnico di Milano. Internal IUNET coordinator: Prof. Luca Benini.

Europe has a lack of intellectual property in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into digital applications. This is critical since the automatization reached saturated levels and AI in digitisation is an accepted approach for the upcoming transformation of the European industry. The potential of AI in economy and society is by far not enough exploited. Potential users of AI are not sufficiently supported to facilitate the integration of AI into their applications. Enabling of performance, industry and humanity by AI for digitising industry is the key to push the AI revolution in Europe and step into the digital age. Existing services providing state of the art machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence solutions are currently available in the cloud. In this project, we aim to transfer machine learning and AI from the cloud to the edge in manufacturing, mobility and robotics. To achieve these targets we connect factories, processes, and devices within digitised industry by utilizing ML and AI for human machine collaboration, change detection, and detection of abnormalities. Hence, we gain knowledge by using existing data and arrange them into a processable representation or collect new data. We use this knowledge to change the semantics and the logical layer with a distributed system intelligence for e.g. quality control, production optimization. In AI4DI, we define a 7-key-target-approach to evaluate the relevance of AI methods within digitised industry. Each key target represents a field of activity and the corresponding target at the same time, dividing systems into heterogenous and homogenous systems, and evolving a common AI method understanding for these systems as well as for human machine collaboration. Furthermore, we investigate, develop and apply AI tools for change detection and distributed system intelligence, and develop hardware and software modules as internet of things (IoT) devices for sensing, actuating, and connectivity processing.

Duration: 42 months, from 01/11/2017to 31/10/2020
Funding: JU part € 385.000 National contribution under negotiation
IU.NET units involved: University of Bologna, Padova, Udine and Politecnico di Milano. The internal scientific director is Prof. Claudio Fiegna.

Description: Ideal continuation of the previous project R2POWER300, R3-POWER-UP targets the development of a 300mm pilot line devoted to the fabrication of "Smart-Power" devices and power discrete components. The objective is to achieve a high energy efficiency to enable energy savings and to contain emissions.

Duration: 36 months, from 01/06/2017 to 31/05/2020
Funding: IJU part € 297.500 National contribution under negotiation
IU.NET units involved: University of Bologna, Padova, Calabria. The internal scientific director is Prof. Gaudenzio Meneghesso.

Description: The project aims at the development of a SiC technology platform for the development of power converters and high efficiency inverters. Applications will be in the transportation, defense, avionics, railway and automobile sectors.

CONNECT: “Innovative smart components, modules and appliances for a truly connected, efficient and secure smart grid”