Interoperable material-to-device simulation box for disruptive electronics

Project description

Electronics permeate all aspects of our lives today, including consumer electronics, industrial automation and manufacturing processes, wireless communications, robotics, drones and transportation. Semiconductor companies in the electronics industry face economic challenges such as rising production costs, intense global competition and the need to continuously invest in research and development to promote innovative technologies. Critical aspects are often the lack of innovation and inefficient manufacturing of devices, which affect competitiveness and profitable growth.

In the past, information and communication technologies were mainly driven by the use of silicon-based products, with development and production largely taking place in the United States and Asia. Current global efforts in the areas of big data, machine learning and quantum computing mean that these purely silicon-based technologies are increasingly being abandoned. This presents a unique opportunity for European industry to rapidly develop new technologies based on innovative materials and electronic components.

Such a pioneering role requires rapid research into material properties (e.g. memory effects for memristive computing), linking these properties to performance in unexplored component architectures and evaluating their business potential. This requires innovative tools to investigate materials and their influence on components. Materials modeling can support this process by reducing the number of experimental trials and promoting efficient top-down and bottom-up design paradigms.

The EU-funded INTERSECT project strengthens the European leadership in materials modeling software and infrastructure. The project has implemented the IM2D box: a hierarchical and scale-reversible multi-physics, multi-model and multi-equation model for the optimization of material-to-component and component-to-material processes, enabling easier exploration of the materials workspace from an industry-oriented perspective on electronic components. A beta version of the code is available for early adopters and has been presented to potential stakeholders in a series of public dissemination events using pilot cases (e.g. OVonic threshold switches and ferroelectric devices).

Fraunhofer IWM subproject:

Fraunhofer IWM led the development of the software interfaces between the atomistic simulation level and the component simulation level. The use of semantic technologies and modern web development by Fraunhofer IWM enables the efficient harmonization of automated data workflows between the different simulation codes in multiscale modeling. A data solution based on knowledge graphs ensures complete, automated documentation of the modeling process and promotes the traceability and reusability of the data sets simulated in the application. The modularization and containerization of the software by Fraunhofer IWM makes it possible to install the IM2D box quickly and easily in potential industrial infrastructures. At the same time, the software can also be integrated as a web application in digital marketplaces such as the MarketPlace platform of the EU project of the same name.