Rector magnificus Sylvia Lenaerts opens the new institute
Eindhoven University of Technology opened a new institute on Tuesday focused on research in chip technology. This new institute, with at least 700 researchers, will instantly become the university’s largest, illustrating TU/e’s ambition to become Europe’s leading chip university.
The institute will bring together such organisations as the Hendrik Casimir Institute, the High Tech Systems Centre, and the Future Chips Flagship, under one roof. This means the new institute will have 700 researchers, and this number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, to (at least) 1,000 researchers by 2030.
To celebrate the opening of the new institute, Minister of Economic Affairs Vincent Karreman was present, along with executives from ASML, IMEC, NXP, and the world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC from Taiwan. They were accompanied by the Rector, Magnificus Sylvia Lenaerts and Mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
Work force
“The Beethoven investment will allow us to add 140 professors to our academic staff”, says the institute’s scientific director, Bart Smolders.
“For every professor, you can add four people to work with them.. Add that number to the 700 current researchers, and you’ll indeed reach over 1,000, but we like to keep things modest in Eindhoven”, Smolders laughs. “The intention is for some of the new researchers to be trained by ourselves”.
Cooperation
Yet the number of researchers isn’t the most remarkable aspect of the new institute. What’s more remarkable is the focus on collaboration between the various disciplines that TU/e wants to foster.
“Philips used to do everything themselves”, says Smolders. “They designed the chips and built the machines to produce them themselves but it’s all become so complex that researchers in different areas of chip technology hardly speak the same language anymore. What we want to do is get those researchers working together more to achieve new scientific breakthroughs”.
“To make these breakthroughs possible, we need to look beyond the various research domains and collaborate with different disciplines”, says Smolders. “We want to shape that collaboration with this institute. We want to encourage our researchers to do so, but also train our students in this way”.
Wider
The new institute will have four domains – machines, design, materials and processes, and fundamental technology. These will cover topics that are further in the future and don’t yet have immediate applications. “Our research into chip technology will be much broader than it was”, says Smolders.
Source: Studio040
Translated by: Seetha
