Ireland leading nanotech development
The Tyndall National Institute (TNI) is leading TOP-HIT (Transfer-print Operations for Heterogeneous Integration), the European technology consortium that addresses the challenges of integrating components and materials at the semiconductor scale.
Based at University College Cork, Ireland, TNI was established to support industry and academia in converting research to market. As one of Europe’s leading in Information and Communications Technology research and development centres and the largest research facility of its type in Ireland, it evolved as a successor to the National Microelectronics Research Centre founded in 1982, and hosts over 460 researchers, engineers and support staff, including 135 postgraduate students.
The TOPHIT project runs until 2018 and has been funded with more than €5m under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme for Smart System Integration using micro-transfer printing (μTP) technology, potentially enabling thousands of devices to be simultaneously taken from one semiconductor wafer and stamped onto another.
For example, light-emitting devices (LEDs, lasers) can be printed on to a suitable material for electronic signal processing. Printed platelets are typically a few microns thick, and can be printed with a placement precision of about 1µm.
Brian Corbett, principal investigator at TNI, said: “The transfer print process, by combining diverse optical, electronic and other functional materials, opens up an enormous range of possibilities for new devices with embedded functionality. This will lead to more compact chips and systems for a variety of applications, such as telecommunications, smart sensing, biomedical sensing and data storage, but the key breakthrough will be the application of micro-transfer-printing to address the challenge of integrating non-compatible components in large volumes at the semiconductor wafer level, eliminating the need for current inelegant integration processes such as wire-bonding.”
Other members of the TOPHIT project consortium are Caliopa Huawei and IMEC (Belgium); Centre for Integrated Photonics Huawei (Ipswich, UK); Seagate (USA); XCeleprint (Ireland); and XFAB (Denmark).
