TACO develops a 3D sensing system with 3D foveation properties endowing service robots with a higher level of motion and affordance perception and interaction capabilities with respect to everyday objects and environments. By 3D foveation properties we mean properties based on the process of acquiring 3D images with coarse level of details, applying fast object recognition techniques to identify areas of interest in the coarse 3D image and then concentrate the image acquisition on details of interest allowing for higher resolution 3D sampling of these details. This new 3D foveation concept will allow robots to interact with everyday environments in a more natural and human-like manner, increasing the level of detail whenever needed for interaction between the robot and everyday objects and humans. These 3D foveation properties are achieved by utilising the power of micro-mirror MEMS technology combined with state-of-the-art time-of-flight methods to ensure a system that is small, light-weight and easily mounted on an ordinary-sized service robot or even a robot arm. The project will explore control strategies for 3D foveation allowing 3D robot vision that is adaptable with space- and time-variant sampling, processing and understanding. The project will verify and test the 3D sensing system in a robotic environment, exploring the capabilities of the system to allow the robot to navigate autonomously and interact with a diverse number of everyday objects. The TACO consortium has RTD partners and industrial end users: Fraunhofer IPMS (micro-mirror scanning device), Fraunhofer IPM (3D range sensors), CTR (Electronics), SINTEF (3D foveation software), TU Wien (benchmarking with state-of-the-art 3D sensing methods), Shadow Robotics (application towards robot grippers) and Oxford Technologies (application towards robots for harsh environments).
For more information please see www.taco-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 4.8 (four point eight) million Euro R&D project.

The driving idea behind DRAGON is to research and use new design methodologies and architectural innovation based on reconfigurability and state-of-the-art digital CMOS technology to break the barriers imposed by the lacking scaling properties of analog components. Radio transceivers serve as an exemplary case with high impact value. With this concept we seek to achieve distinct reductions in cost, size and energy consumption for multi-standard cellular handsets, and other products employing similar technology, while meeting higher demands on data rate. Increased data rates require the energy consumption per transmitted or received data bit to be reduced, both to save energy and to avoid thermal problems. When successful, wireless data services become an attractive low-cost alternative for novel applications. Always connected should be an option for everyone. With increased integration levels and with a low thermal and energy budget, both system-in-a-package and system-on-a-chip become reality and, SMEs and other non-wireless European industries will be able to develop radio-based products and services. Only the top few handset and component manufacturers will be able to sustain the rapid ICT business development, and Europe has to keep, and further strengthen, its position here.  In DRAGON we are forming a balanced consortium covering the full design chain from customer requirements over system integration to hardware design. Top universities are included to achieve optimum innovation and move the current boundaries of the state-of-the art. This will strengthen the European telecom equipment and semiconductor industry. In DRAGON we will develop a design platform comprising multi-standard (EDGE, WCDMA, LTE, and, 4G) transceiver specifications and novel flexible architectures as a tool to meet them. The number of required external components, like analog filters, will be replaced by reconfigurable digital CMOS circuitry; and critical building-blocks will be implemented to demonstrate proof of concept, both of the architecture and design methodology, including: a highly linear combined channel filter and receive ADC, RF digitisation receiver, a transmitter DAC, a switched-mode PA with adaptive digital predistortion and adaptive matching networks. All critical building-blocks will be fabricated, tested, and demonstrated in state-of-the-art CMOS technology. The project results will also be provided to standardisation bodies to allow alignment of requirements to technology limits.
For more information please see www.dragon-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 5.2 (five point two) million Euro R&D project.

MEMFIS stands for Ultrasmall MEMS FT-IR Spectrometer. The feasibility of a spectroscopic mid-infrared analyser based on miniature FT-IR spectrometers will be demonstrated while using newest technologies and production techniques, integrated electronics and sophisticated software approaches. The developed spectrometer utilises innovative optical components based on MEMS technology, leading to very compact and rugged spectrometric devices with ultra-rapid scanning capabilities, that would replace near-IR systems and open way to new applications. The FT-system will be designed to be modular, allowing attaching application-optimised accessories to the spectrometer module. One module will be an integrated data evaluation system, allowing programming application-specific data evaluation routines into the device. Together with a suitable sample interface, this will allow to build fully spectroscopic handheld MIR sensors with inherent intelligence. The analysers are thus capable of delivering concentration data rather than spectra, autonomously making yes/no decisions or requesting maintenance or re-calibration. In summary, the MEMFIS project targets to progress well beyond the state of the art:
- Miniaturisation of FT-IR spectrometers by about one order of magnitude. It is expected that the MEMFIS concept will lead to an extremely rugged and reliable device, which will be based on integration of maintenance-free micro optical interferometer system for the mid-IR range, high scanning frequency, compactness and low power.
- Reduction of the measuring time of FT-IR spectrometers to (sub-)ms time resolution in direct scanning mode. The MEMFIS instrument aims at outperforming all FT-IR spectrometers that are currently commercially available by reducing considerably the time used for acquiring a scan.
- Development and application-oriented optimisation of novel translational photonic MEMS devices and concepts. Compared to conventional systems, the use of optical MEMS opens the possibility to produce small and reliable systems in a large quantity at competitive production costs.
- Prototype proof of principle and feasibility of an autonomously operating smart micro-FT-IR analyser/sensor, including the implementation of chemometric models and stable data processing algorithms.?
For more information please see www.memfis-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 4.4 (four point four) million Euro R&D project.

The COPPER project will provide a novel copper deposition process to overcome the limitations of currently employed interconnect formation processes enabling device scaling beyond the 32 nm technology node. COPPER will achieve the final goal through collaborations within a very strong consortium based on a team with outstanding scientific, engineering and manufacturing qualifications. In a first phase, electrolyte ingredients will be selected and experimentally verified, a deposition cell designed through modelling and simulation as well as new analytical techniques evaluated to enable adequate analysis of the deposited films. The second phase will focus on the development of the copper deposition process based on the findings from phase one with the additional support of micro-modelling and the process scaled and integrated into a 300mm proof-of-concept. In the third and final phase, the process will be integrated into a complete interconnect scheme, and optimized according to the industrial chip manufacturer’s needs. For more information please see www.copper-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 5.1 (five point one) million Euro R&D project.

In order to strengthen Europe’s leading position in high-speed, end-to-end, mobile network systems technology, the Multi-Base consortium has identified three main areas where research will have a major impact on the advancement of state-of-the-art technology and the emergence of a sound competitive and innovative environment for the European communications and services industry: multi-tasking radio, scalable reconfigurable multi processor technology (MPSOC frameworks) and algorithm/architecture co-design for maximum energy efficiency. The Multi-Base project objectives target the elimination of key technical and commercial barriers to ubiquitous broadband access by enabling efficient and sustainable disposition of operation and production factors as spectrum, power engineering cost and silicon process technology. Drawing on project research in these three areas, the Multi-Base consortium will demonstrate new handset baseband architectures that enable end-to-end interconnection of humans and devices, with ability to support tenfold scaling in the number of interoperating connectivity links at the same cost and power consumption as today’s technology. For more information please see www.multibase-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 5.3 (five point three) million Euro R&D project.

Development of hardware devices and software products is facilitated by a design flow, and a set of tools (e.g., compilers and debuggers), which automate tasks normally performed by experienced, highly skilled developers. However, in both hardware and software examples the tools are generic since they seldom provide specific support for a particular domain. The goal of this project is to design, develop and deploy a toolbox that will support the specific domain of cryptographic software engineering. Ordinarily, development of cryptographic software is a huge challenge: security and trust is mission critical and modern applications processing sensitive data typically require the deployment of sophisticated cryptographic techniques. The proposed toolbox will allow non-experts to develop high-level cryptographic applications and business models by means of cryptography-aware high-level programming languages and compilers. The description of such applications in this way will allow automatic analysis and transformation of cryptographic software to detect security critical implementation failures, e.g., software and hardware based side-channel attacks, when realizing low level cryptographic primitives and protocols. Ultimately, the end result will be better quality, more robust software at much lower cost; this provides both a clear economic benefit to the European industry in the short term, and positions it better in dealing with any future roadblocks to ICT development in the longer term. For more information please see www.cace-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 4.8 (four point eight) million Euro R&D project.

Trusted Computing has become an established technology for verification and implementation of integrity and security at personal computers. Similar requirements are also needed for embedded computing platforms which have alike trust and security problems due to the increasing complexity and therefore instability of operating systems and applications as well as connection to the Internet with its security dangers and attacks. Until now the TC standard is mainly targeted for PCs with their large resources of available code space, specific bus interfaces and large computing power which are not available with embedded platforms. As there are a much higher number of embedded computing platforms like PCs in the field, it becomes a necessity to adapt the current TC standard to embedded platforms. The project will make an systematic approach for the development of trusted embedded systems, consisting of hardware platforms with integrated trust components and also work on the necessary trusted operating systems: (A) Trusted hardware, Trusted Platform Module as VHDL design, which could adapted to different host systems together with processors supporting a trust architecture. (B) Trusted operating systems mainly based on the new virtualisation/hypervisor architecture which are already in use at the PC world. Adapting it to the specific requirements of small platforms and trusted modules. (C) Security layers for implementing easy accessible security mechanisms. (D) Trusted protocols: Elementary TC protocols like TSS (Host interface API) and TNC (trusted network connect, an advanced secure communication protocol) will be adapted for embedded platforms. (E) Application examples will give us feedback about available trust functionality, application friendliness and user requirements. For more information please see www.tecom-project.eu.

Technikon is the official coordinator of this 9.9 (nine point nine) million Euro R&D project.