Information & Communication Technology
Information and communication technologies and related systems and devices undergo constant developments in terms of miniaturisation of components and optimisation of materials used.
Not only all components of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as smart phones or computers undergo constant developments, but also semiconductor technology is still a very active field of research. Beyond, scientists envision a new kind of communication technology - quantum computing or quantum information storage. Current research efforts focus on the fundamentals of quantum systems and may pave the way to build such a device.
Listed below are projects that deal with materials and processes for ICT applications.
Polymers have significant potential as functional and structural materials in microsystems technology, because of their broad variety of properties and low cost. Our projects focus on determining and controlling the mechanical and electrical properties of polymer structures at the micro scale. Materials under investigation are thermosetting polymers, e.g. photosensitive SU-8 and PI, thermoplastics such as PMMA and PE, and polymer composites filled with magnetic nanoparticles. These materials can find applications especially in the health care field due to their biocompatible properties.
Today societies have a quickly growing need for processing and storing ever increasing amounts of information. In the not so distant future the miniaturization and large scale integration of electronic components will approach atomic scales where quantum mechanical effects will start to dominate over classical ones. Our long term goal is to search for a scalable solid-state realization of a quantum information processor which makes use of these quantum effects. We investigate superconducting circuits operated at low temperatures and microwave frequencies for achieving this ambitious goal. In particular, we explore a specific approach to this problem, which exploits the strong controllable interaction between two-level quantum electronic circuits used as qubits, the carriers of quantum information, with single photons stored in high quality on-chip cavities to develop a promising quantum computing architecture for successfully demonstrating first quantum algorithms.