MNTEE · MNT Europe Extension

The FP6/Infrastructure project MNT-Europe (RII3-CT-2004-506231) has led to the creation of a unique distributed platform for research and development in the field of Micro and Nano Technologies (MNT), based on the national facilities of Léti (F), CSEM (CH), IZM-M and IISB Fraunhofer (D), IMEC (B) and Tyndall (Ir) research institutes. The networking and Joint Research Activities performed during this project have highlighted the strengths and been able to pinpoint the remaining weaknesses of this Alliance. The basic idea of this proposal is to complete in the most efficient way this integration, based on the experience of this Alliance defined between major partners. Moreover, this will allow in a further step to aggregate new European R&D partners into a very robust core. Basically, three main activities will be dealt with: - a) global management of technical, strategic and commercial joint activities, with both consolidation of common strategy and growth (based on expertise from mixed groups of technical experts, managers and commercial people), and the refinement in the coordination of operation plans (and a two step strategy with respect to the industrial world and the academic one, in view of future international access activities). - b) developing exploitation of the platform for preparing access to external further partners: this action will deal with solving interoperability problems which occurred during the MNT Europe project, mainly due to the difference in wafers size in use at the different institutes. In order to be able to handle future open access, a central contact point should be created, which allows all partners in the project to access and distribute all incoming contacts. - c) optimization of internal exchange/operation: this theme will mainly focus on improvement of the information exchange, refinement of common technologies roadmaps and new services on the MNT Europe website.