BeforeHand · Boosting Performance of Phase Change Devices by Hetero- and Nano-Structure Material Design

This proposal aims at establishing the foundations of a new technology, suitable for the implementation in networks of Electronic Smart Systems (ESS) exploiting the capability of phase-change materials to process and store data in the very same physical place, with particular focus on automotive applications. The ESS of the future should be able to sense its environment, locally store and process the information, as well as communicate with other objects in a network. Within our project the realization of processing/storage devices will be achieved through the development of new material combinations with the best material trade-off benchmarked for automotive applications. We will make use of a test vehicle to allow the comparison among different materials. After successful evaluation of the best material combination, a demonstrator with processing/storage ability will be implemented. At the end of the project a full evaluation of the demonstrator will be performed. Furthermore, integration in an embedded chip environment for automotive application, as well as scalability and reliability issues, will be evaluated. The results are going to be made public and used to plan the first chip with embedded state of the art technology to be implemented in the automotive sector, with an expected direct impact on the Internet of Things (IoT) market. BeforeHand will provide a practical realization of such a novel technological computing paradigm. BeforeHand is a project with a strong involvement of material development, device preparation and functionality in terms of memory devices, as well as data processing devices, in order to address the call requirements. Chalcogenide heterostructures developed in BeforeHand for processing/storage devices to be embedded in automotive IoT smart devices have a disruptive future innovative potential, which might lead to breakthroughs at different technology levels: from basic research beyond the state-of-the-art, to products.