Excellence in Research

The publication "Background Ducking to Produce Esthetically Pleasing Audio for TV with Clear Speech" by Matteo Torcoli, Dr. Jouni Paulus, Christian Simon, Alex Freke-Morin and Prof. Ben Shirley was honoured as Best Peer-Reviewed Paper at the AES conference in Dublin. In their paper on a subjective test, the scientists investigated the preferences of 22 normal-hearing listeners for the Loudness Difference (LD) between the beginning and the end of the ducking process.

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The exhibit of the "Leistungszentrum Digitale Vernetzung (LZDV)" was awarded third place at the Think Tank Awards of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft at the Hannover Messe 2019. With their jointly developed exhibit and the slogan "Light up your Production", the four Fraunhofer Institutes in Berlin showed how digital networking can efficiently meet the high demands of industrial environment, using optical wireless technology.

Dr. Oliver Thiergart received the EURASIP Award for his dissertation entitled "Flexible Multi-Microphone Acquisition and Processing of Spatial Sound Using Parametric Sound Field Representations". His work deals with the flexible and efficient acquisition and processing of spatial sound using multiple microphones.

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Benjamin Ruccius received the Best Paper Award at the ICPE 2019 Conference in Mumbai for his paper "A Cascaded Control Concept for Modular Multilevel Converters with Capacitor Voltage Estimation using a Kalman Filter". In his paper an approach for estimating the submodule capacitor voltages in a Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is presented, which was realized in a hardware test setup.

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Christoph Marczok received the Young Engineer Award of the PCIM Europe 2019 for his contribution on the topic "Low Inductive SiC Mold Module with Direct Cooling".

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The Outstanding Paper Award was presented at the Transducers-Eurosensors to the scientists K. Meinel, C. Stöckel, M. Melzer, S. Zimmermann, R. Forke, K. Hiller and T. Otto for their paper "Piezoelectric Scanning Micromirror with Large Scan Angle based on Thin Film Aluminum Nitride". In this publication micro mirrors based on piezoelectric thin-film aluminium nitride (AlN) are presented. The microsystems with a footprint of 6 mm² are successfully manufactured in 150 mm SOI technology.

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Richard Klemm, considered one of the most influential scientists in the research field of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for radar systems, was awarded the "Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and Applications".

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Peter Franze was awarded the Professor Schwabe Prize of the TU Dresden for his outstanding master's thesis entitled "Characterization of a Spin-On-Glass Material for Use as an Intermediate Dielectric in the Damascene Process".

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At the end of June 2019 the scientist Ievgen Kabin presented the paper "On the Complexity of Attacking Commercial Authentication Products" at the International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security on the Canary Islands (Spain) and therefore received the Best Paper Award.

In September 2019, Tarek Ali received the SSDM Young Researcher Award 2019 for his research on ferroelectric materials.

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In September 2019 Bettina Wehreing received the Poster Award at the 18th "European Conference in Applications of Surface and Interface Analysis" in Dresden.

Dr. Tim Schröder receives an ERC Starting Grant and thus a five-year research grant in the field of quantum internet. With the project QUERP "Quantum Repeater Architectures Based on Quantum Memories and Photonic Encoding" he is researching the next generation of faster and safer communication in integrated quantum optics.

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Giovanni D'Apice receives the AFCEA Study Prize 2019 for his final thesis "Inverse Sythetic Aperture Radar (ISAR)", in which the author shows how an inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) serves as a means of providing image-like information about a distant, moving target.

At the 18^th DRIP conference in Berlin, PhD student Jonas Weinrich received the Best Student Poster Award from the international steering committee for his work on crystal defects in semiconductors.

At the 4^th international "MERGE Technologies Conference Lightweight Structures" the scientist Toni Großmann was awarded the Best Paper Award for his paper "Reflection based Strain Sensing using Metamaterials". His publication shows that it is possible to provide a GRP laminate with a specific electromagnetic behaviour by integrating resonator arrays. It is also shown that the specific electromagnetic behaviour can be influenced by structural changes and thus opens the possibility to monitor the condition of lightweight structures.

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The SPEAKER project for the development of a language assistance platform received an award in the innovation competition "Artificial intelligence as a driver for economically relevant ecosystems" of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). The FMD institute Fraunhofer IIS is also involved in the project.

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The research prize "Transformative Science 2019" in the field of sustainability research went to Prof. Dr. Melanie Jaeger-Erben. Her approach reflects sustainability research with innovative transdisciplinary methods.

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Jannik Springer's master's thesis with the topic "Radar waveforms and processing methods for frequency modulated wave operation to analyze orbital parameters of fragmenting objects in earth orbit" was honored with the ARGUS Award in September 2019.

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In recognition of his extraordinary achievements in science and research, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Lang received the highest VDE award of the Society for Microelectronics, Microsystems and Precision Engineering – the GMM Award.

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For the paper "Comparison of Solder Joint Fatique Life Prediction and Several Long-Term Testing Results" Rainer Dudek received the Best Paper Award at the Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems. His publication discusses solder fatigue phenomena at lead-free solder joints and further results that go beyond previous results.

Making microwave research visible and connecting actors from research and industry - this has been the driving force of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Heinrich for many years. For his outstanding commitment, he was awarded the "Distinguished Service Award" by the European Microwave Association (EuMA).

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In October 2019, the scientists Y. Varabei, I. Kabin, Z. Dyka, D. Klann, P. Langendoerfer presented their paper "Intelligent Clustering as a Means to Improve K-Means Based Horizontal Attacks" at the International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.
In her paper, horizontal side channel analysis attacks against three crypto implementations are presented and the effectiveness of attacks using K-Means as an analysis tool is shown. Intelligent clustering" is introduced as a new approach.

In October 2019, Dr. Christian Dittmar was awarded the PhD prize of the Staedtler Foundation for his outstanding doctoral thesis on "Source separation and restoration of drum sounds in music recordings".

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For her paper "Ferrites in Transfer Molded Power SiPs - Challenges in Packaging" Tina Thomas was awarded the Best Paper of Track at the "IMAPS International Symposium on Microelectronics" in Boston, USA. In this paper, she and her co-authors Marius van Dijk, Marc Dreissigacker, Stefan Hoffmann, Hans Walter, Karl-Friedrich Becker and Martin Schneider-Ramelow present their latest findings on the encapsulation of ferrites in epoxy-based encapsulation materials.

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In recognition of his extraordinary achievements in science and research, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Lang received the highest VDE award of the Society for Microelectronics, Microsystems and Precision Engineering – the GMM Award.

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For the paper "Comparison of Solder Joint Fatique Life Prediction and Several Long-Term Testing Results" Rainer Dudek received the Best Paper Award at the Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems. His publication discusses solder fatigue phenomena at lead-free solder joints and further results that go beyond previous results.

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Prof. Dr. Meinard Müller was appointed as the President of the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) for two years.

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Andrej Konforta, Christos Liontas, Thomas Bertuch and Thomas Eibert are awarded the "IEEE Antennas and Propagation Ulrich L. Rohde Innovative Conference Paper Award 2019" for their publication "Approximation of the Active Reflecton Coefficient in Phased Arrays via the Concept of Reaction". The paper presents an affordable alternative to the approximation of the mutual coupling based on the reaction integral and the Huygens principle for an exemplary 5×5 planar array.

The project and EUREKA cluster for micro- and nanoelectronics "NexGen" (Next Generation of Body Monitoring) won the CATRENE Innovation Award for the "Most Innovative Project". In the name of the project Mrs. Tanja Seiderer is the award winner.

With the video clip "Behind the Scenes at the Fraunhofer IZM" student assistant Dominik Ädra reached the 3rd place at the "Fraunhofer Communication Prize 2019". The Fraunhofer Prize is awarded for outstanding PR work and is a motivation and recognition for the development and implementation of own ideas.

Tanja Braun was elected to the IEEE EPS Board of Govenors in December 2019. The EPS is administered by a Board of Governors (BoG) consisting of elected and appointed volunteer members. Tanja Braun was appointed as the representative for women in engineering.

The scientists Matthias Schulz, Moritz Wild, Raphael Chacon, Bernd Wunder and Martin März received the Best Paper Award at the "4th IEEE International Future Energy Electronics Conference (IFEEC)" in Singapore for their publication "A Bidirectional and Isolated DC/DC Converter Connecting Mobile Battery Systems to a DC Grid in Commercial Buildings". In their paper a novel modulation scheme for an isolated DC / DC converter in down-conversion is presented, which allows a wide input and output voltage range.

Simon Quergfelder was awarded the EnCN Energy Prize 2019 for his master's thesis "Commissioning of a 3-level-converter to investigate different control methods and their influence on power quality and voltage symmetry". In his thesis, continuous and discontinuous modulation methods are presented and implemented as carrier-based modulation.

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For the publication "Local 2DEG Density Control in Heterostructures of Piezoelectric Materials and Its Application in GaN HEMT Fabrication Technology" the authors Konstantin Osipov, Joachim Würfl, Ina Ostermay, Frank Brunner, Günther Tränkle and Maniteja Bodduluri were awarded with the renowned Paul Rappaport Award 2018. The Electron Device Society honors the best work published in last year's IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices every year.

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The largest professional association of electrical and computer engineers (IEEE) has awarded Prof. Dr. Meinard Müller for his work in the field of "Music Signal Processing" as "IEEE Fellow" 2020.

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The scientist Dr. Herman Jalli Ng has been honoured with the best paper award at the Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC) in Singapore for his paper "Highly-Integrated Radar Transceiver with 2 TX and 4 RX Channels for Range, Azimuthal and Polar Angle Measurements".

The top-class research achievements of Prof. Dr. Daniel O'Hagan were internationally recognized and honored by the Early Career Award.

Prof. Giovanni Del Galdo, from the Department of Electronic Measurement and Signal Processing, was awarded the TU Ilmenau Teaching Award 2019 for special achievements in teaching.

The scientist Marcus Wislicenus received the Poster Award at the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference and Materials for Advanced Metallization Conference 2019 (IITC/MAM) for his paper "Investigation of Layout- and Process Dependence of Cu-ECD for Advanced Nodes". His work investigates fundamental interactions between ultra-thin Cu- and Co-based seed layers with low-acid plating chemistry in connection with advanced dual damascene metallization.

Thomas von der Grün, Norbert Franke and Thomas Pellkofer were awarded the 2019 Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize for their development of "Sports Tracking - The Digital Revolution in Team Sports", a localization technology based on the time-of-flight measurement of radio signals specially adapted to the dynamic processes in ice hockey.

With her dissertation on "Compressive acquisition and processing of sparse analog signals", Dr. Anastasia Lavrenko is awarded the dissertation prize 2019 of the Universitätsgesellschaft Ilmenau e.V.

At the end of last year, the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), USA, received the "NASA Group Achievement Award". This award also honors the achievements of Dr. Markus Krutzik as a postdoctoral researcher at JPL. The CAL team developed an instrument that was successfully used to generate ultra-cold atoms on the International Space Station (ISS). Cold atoms can be used in space in the future, for example to enable highly accurate and drift-free measurements of inertial forces for navigation. They are also suitable for studies of fundamental physics, for example to test Einstein's equivalence principle. After returning to Berlin, Markus Krutzik continued to support the CAL instrument development as a technical consultant. NASA's prestigious award is presented, among other things, for outstanding group achievements that have contributed significantly to the successful mission of the Space Agency. Markus Krutzik has been in charge of the Joint Lab Integrated Quantum Sensors of the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since January 2019.

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At the "EBL 2020 - Electronic assemblies and printed circuit boards" in Fellbach near Stuttgart, the scientist David Schütze was presented with the Best Paper Award. In his article "Realization of highly miniaturized robust radio sensor nodes by means of component embedding in the printed circuit board", Schütze, Karl-Friedrich Becker, Christian Tschoban, Christian Voigt, Thomas Löher, Stefan Kosmider, Andreas Ostmann, Lars Böttcher, Martin Schneider-Ramelow and Klaus-Dieter Lang describe the development of an energy-autonomous, extremely small and robust sensor module using printed circuit board embedding technology.

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The paper "Broadband 145GHz Photodetector Module Targeting 200G Baud Applications" by Patrick Runge, Felix Ganzer, Jonas Gläsel, Sebastian Wünsch, Sven Mutschall and Martin Schell was named Top-Scored Paper at the Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition in March 2020.

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The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has announced the winning proposals in the International Research Marketing ideas competition. The FMD-Institute Fraunhofer IZM receives a prize money of 25 000 Euro for the concept of creating a knowledge-based communication platform and a blog centred around the topic of electronic packaging.

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The scientists Prof. Dr. Alexander Pflaum and Sebastian Lempert were awarded the HMD Best Paper Award in Erlangen/ Nuremberg for their publication "Comparability of the functionality of IoT software platforms through their uniform description in the form of a taxonomy and reference architecture". The object of their work is the derivation of the functionality of a complete IoT software platform with the help of a qualitative content analysis from available data of the most important platforms available on the market and description of these in the form of a taxonomy and reference architecture based on it. Their article was published in HMD issue 330 - volume 56/6.

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Dr. Peter Ramm from Fraunhofer EMFT received the IEEE technical field award 2020 in electronic packaging, together with Prof. Koyanagi from Tohoku University Sendai.

Their contribution to the development and commercialization of 3D integrated circuit (3DICC) integration processes has played a key role in enabling ever-smaller yet more-powerful devices especially important to mobile communications.

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Together with Intracom, Dr. Thomas Merkle received the EUCNC 2020 Best Paper Award for his work on THz data links using real-time beamforming.

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Kirill Klein has won the Young Engineer Award of PCIM Europe 2020 for his paper on “Low Inductive Full Ceramic SiC Power Module for High-Temperature Automotive Applications”. The formal presentation of the award, followed by a personal Q&A session, will take place at 10:20 to 10:30 am on July 8th as part of this year’s online PCIM conference.

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Wolfgang Heinrich, Head of FBH's Microwave Department, was honored with the IEEE MTT Distinguished Service Award 2020. The prize recognizes his significant contributions and outstanding service to the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and the microwave profession over a sustained period of time. Originally, it was supposed to be presented at the International Microwave Symposium in Los Angeles in June 2020. Due to the ongoing pandemic situation, the award ceremony was postponed until next year.

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During the ITEA 3 PO Days 2020, the Award of Excellence was imparted to the project "Flexible Application Monitoring Platform, Platform for Application Flexibility in Cyber-Physical Systems" (Flex4Apps). The project focuses on the interaction of cloud, communication and IoT components, which will be even more crucial for many application areas in the future. The aim of the project was to increase the reliability, availability and stability of these systems.

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For their robust, reliable and tamper-proof receiver technology Galileo PRS, Dr. Wolfgang Felber, Dr. Günter Rohmer and Alexander Rügamer, Fraunhofer IIS, received the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2020. 

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Patrick Scharf and Christoph Sohrmann received the best paper award for their publication "Formation of multiple current filaments and the effect of filament confinement in silicon based Pin diodes" which was presented at the IEEE International Semiconductor Conference (CAS), session modelling, in 2020.

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Dr. Bernd Eckardt and Dr. Stefan Matlok from Fraunhofer IISB in Erlangen were awarded the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2020 for the development of a new generation of extremely powerful DC/DC converters for fuel cell vehicles.

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A project entitled “Energy-efficient schedule optimization of Nuremberg’s subway network” won the 2020 CNA Innovation Award in the Intelligence for Transportation and Logistics category. The project consortium consisted of Fraunhofer IIS, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and VAG Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft Nürnberg and was led by Dr. Andreas Bärmann from Fraunhofer IIS.

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The paper "Shifted Excitation Raman Difference Spectroscopy with Charge-Shifting Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) Lock-In Detection" was honored with the prestigious William F. Meggers Award of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (SAS). The prize was awarded at the SAS fall meeting during the SciX 2020 conference. It recognizes the publication of the authors Kay Sowoidnich, Michael Towrie, Martin Maiwald, Bernd Sumpf and Pavel Matousek as the outstanding publication of the year 2019 in the journal "Applied Spectroscopy" (vol. 73, no. 11, pp. 1265-1276). The paper is one result of the very successful collaboration between the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Great Britain.

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The winners of the INNOspace Masters competition, which is organized by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), have been announced: On 14 October, a Berlin-based team from Technische Universität, Humboldt-Universität and the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut won the DLR Challenge. This prize supports projects with up to 400,000 euros. Moreover, the winning project "QuMSeC" was chosen as overall winner of the INNOSpace Masters 2019/20.

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Dr.-Ing. Christian Reimann and M.Sc. Kevin Schuck from Fraunhofer IISB in Erlangen won the 3rd place in the 2020 DLR Challenge of the INNOspace Masters competition. They were awarded for their idea to produce simple and cost-effective high-temperature protective coatings on carbon composite materials for aerospace applications. 

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EuroPAT-MASIP project team from Fraunhofer ENAS, Besi NL and Amkor has been awarded with the Outstanding Paper Award at ASME 2020 InterPACK Conference (Oct 27 – 28, 2020) for their paper »The Systematic study of Fan-Out Wafer Warpage Using Analytical, Numerical and Experimental Methods«.

Congratulations to Ghanshyam Gadhiya, Sven Rzepka, Thomas Otto, Sebastiaan Kersjes and Felandorio Fernandes!

The paper focuses on characterizing the physics of wafer warpage, which is a challenge for many process steps in fan-out wafer-level packaging (FoWLP) technologies used for heterogeneous system integration. The new study provides recommendations and good practical guidance for improving the design and optimizing the process flow of FoWLP solutions with increased product yield and reliability.

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For her commitment to sharing knowledge between university, research and education, Prof. Ute Schmid, Group Manager at Fraunhofer IIS, was awarded the Rainer Markgraf Prize.

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Dr. Nicolas Kurz’ dissertation on aluminum scandium nitride for microacoustic high frequency filters was awarded the Eva Mayr-Stihl Young Talents Prize.

Dr. Teena Chakkalayil Hassan, Fraunhofer IIS, received the award for her outstanding dissertation entitled “Towards robust and interpretable practical applications of automatic mental state analysis using a dynamic and hybrid facial action estimation approach.”

The paper "Non-uniform longitudinal current density induced power saturation in GaAs-based high power diode lasers" by Seval Arslan et. al. was selected as featured article by the journal Applied Physics Letters. The editors of the journal thereby honor scientific publications that they consider to be among the best in the journal.

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Associate Professor Dr. Tobias Erlbacher from Fraunhofer IISB was entrusted as a "Power Semiconductor International Advisory Board Member" by the Acting Mayor of the Busan Metropolitan City, South Korea.

For their ReICOvAir (Reliable Industrial Communication Over the Air)  system, the Fraunhofer IIS project team received the Excellence Award 2020 from CELTIC-NEXT, the EUREKA cluster for next-generation communications.

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The successful work of the REFERENCE project under the careful guidance of Francois Brunier of Soitec and Yves Quéré of the CEA-Leti research organization led to the project being picked from a group of 30 contenders for the “Stars of Europe” trophy on 16 December 2020. Fraunhofer IZM contributed substantially to the project with Ivan Ndip, Markus Wöhrmann, Uwe Maaß, Tanja Braun and many other colleagues working on the development and high-frequency characterization of wafer-level technologies for packaging HF ICs as well as the package integration and evaluation of miniature passive, low-loss components for HF filter applications.

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The Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS annually awards the Fraunhofer ENAS Research Award for outstanding scientific results with high application relevance. This year the prize goes to the electrical engineer Dr.-Ing. Alexander Otto. He receives the award for his research work on novel approaches to lifetime modeling with a focus on power electronics components. He has succeeded in making the transition from purely load-based models to stress- and failure-effect-based approaches for service life prediction. For practical applications in the industrial environment, this will mean a significant increase in prediction accuracy in the future. Power electronics are used in the field of renewable energies, electromobility and Industry 4.0. In this context, the requirements for reliability assessments of power electronics are increasing more and more as components and functional materials become more complex, require more power density and functional integration, electronics are used in harsher environmental conditions, and functional safety must be ensured, e.g., for autonomous driving.

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Appointed to the Bavarian Council on AI: Prof. Alexander Martin, Director of Fraunhofer IIS, Prof. Ute Schmid, Head of Group EKI, Fraunhofer IIS, and Prof. Thomas Seidl, Fraunhofer IIS.

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The natural-gas CHP unit (combined heat and power plant) at Fraunhofer IISB has been awarded as "CHP Unit of the Year 2020" by the magazine "Energie & Management", after it already had been "CHP Unit of the Month" in June 2020. The CHP unit ist part of the Fraunhofer IISB living lab on energy technologies.

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Wolfgang Holub, Senior Engineer at Fraunhofer IIS, received the User Award from the German Society for Non-Destructive Testing (DGZfP) for his work in the field of “Robot-based computed tomography on large components in automotive engineering.”

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The German TV and Film Technology Society (FKTG) recognized Eva Hasenberger, a member of the Automotive Audio Research group at Fraunhofer IIS, for her master’s thesis on binauralization in vehicle sound systems.

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) researchers Dr. Wojciech Samek and Dr. Sebastian Lapuschkin together with Dr. Grégoire Montavon and Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller (TU Berlin) as well as Prof. Alexander Binder  (University of Oslo) have jointly received the 2020 »Pattern Recognition Best Paper Award« and »Pattern Recognition Medal«. The international scientific journal Pattern Recognition awards the prize annually to highlight papers that have accomplished an outstanding impact on their respective research field. The award committee honored the researchers for their 2017 publication »Explaining Nonlinear Classification Decisions with Deep Taylor Decomposition« for its influence on the field of machine learning.

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The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) researchers Dr. Wojciech Samek and Dr. Sebastian Lapuschkin together with Dr. Grégoire Montavon and Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller (TU Berlin) as well as Prof. Alexander Binder  (University of Oslo) have jointly received the 2020 "Pattern Recognition Best Paper Award" and "Pattern Recognition Medal”. The international scientific journal Pattern Recognition awards the prize annually to highlight papers that have accomplished an outstanding impact on their respective research field. The award committee honored the researchers for their 2017 publication "Explaining Nonlinear Classification Decisions with Deep Taylor Decomposition" for its influence on the field of machine learning.

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The 2021 THz Science and Tech. Best Paper Award of the IEEE MTT Society is presented to a team of eleven authors from Germany, Poland and Lithuania - including five scientists from the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut. It is awarded to M. Bauer, A. Rämer, S. A. Chevtchenko, K. Y. Osipov, D. Cibiraite, S. Pralgauskaite, K. Ikamas, A. Lisauskas, W. Heinrich, V. Krozer, and H. G. Roskos for their paper entitled: »A High-Sensitivity AlGaN/GaN HEMT Terahertz Detector With Integrated Broadband Bow-Tie Antenna« in IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology, Vol. 9, Issue 4, pp. 430-444, July 2019.

Dr. Simon Fichtner received the prize for his discovery that the thin-film material aluminum scandium nitride (AIScN) has ferroelectric properties.

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The European Commission recognized the UNIQORN research project in its Innovation Radar for the development of a "novel technology for quantum communications, including design and production of the demonstrator of a fully integrated on-chip subsystem." The EU expert panel stated that the respective technology covers the needs of existing markets and deems it "tech ready". As part of the EU analysis, the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) and its project partners Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and University of Bristol were highlighted as "Key Innovators".

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The European Commission has evaluated and highlighted an innovation developed in the TERAmeasure research project as part of its Innovation Radar. According to the EU experts' analysis, the TERAmeasure innovation "Ultra-wideband continuous frequency measurement (30GHz to 3THz) using a photonic vector network analyzer (VNA)" covers the needs of existing markets and has the potential to be "business ready" by the end of the project. Furthermore, the European Comission has distinguished the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) together with its project partners Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology as "Key Innovators".

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The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) researchers Dr. Wojciech Samek and Luis Oala together with Jan Macdonald and Maximilian März (TU Berlin) were honored with the award for "best scientific contribution" at this year's medical imaging conference BVM. The scientists received the award for their paper "Interval Neural Networks as Instability Detectors for Image Reconstructions". The paper demonstrates how uncertainty quantification can be used to detect errors in deep learning models.

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) researchers Dr. Wojciech Samek and Luis Oala together with Jan Macdonald and Maximilian März (TU Berlin) were honored with the award for »best scientific contribution« at this year's medical imaging conference BVM. The scientists received the award for their paper »Interval Neural Networks as Instability Detectors for Image Reconstructions«. The paper demonstrates how uncertainty quantification can be used to detect errors in deep learning models.

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Dr. Christoph Wasserzier received the award for his outstanding contribution to NATO SET activities, in particular for his pioneering work in within the SET-225 Task Group „Spatial and Waveform Diverse Noise Radar“, which lasted from 2015 to 2019 with the participation of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine. In December 2020, the SET-287 Research Task Group, chaired by Dr. Wasserzier, was established, building on the results of the SET-225.

A team from Fraunhofer FHR has won the Best Paper Award of EuSAR 2021. For their paper titled “ISAR imaging by integrated Compressed Sensing, range alignment and autofocus” Felix Rosebrock, Dr. Jens Rosebrock, Dr. Delphine Cerutti-Maori and Prof. Joachim Ender received the first prize.  

Computer architecture inspired by the human brain – to most people, this sounds rather abstract and removed from everyday life. Far from it: a research team from Fraunhofer IIS and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has developed neuromorphic hardware capable of detecting early signs of atrial fibrillation and considerably reducing the risk of stroke. In other words, this application has an entirely practical place in everyday life. Such wearables must be as energy-efficient as possible in evaluating the ECG data they collect. With this in mind, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) launched the »energy-efficient AI system« pilot innovation competition. The challenge was to detect atrial fibrillation at an accuracy of at least 90 percent while consuming as little energy as possible. The competition attracted 27 entries, 11 of which were given the chance to develop their solutions. The latter group included the team from Fraunhofer IIS and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) with its »Lo3-ML« (Low-power low-memory low-cost ECG signal analysis using ML algorithms) project – and triumphed as one of the four winning teams. 

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The networking of objects in the Internet of Things — or IoT for short — is becoming increasingly important, and demand for connected IoT devices is growing rapidly everywhere, from consumers to Industry 4.0. But until now, no suitable and reliable method of communication has been available for transferring many thousands of data packages at the same time. A team of researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen/Nuernberg has now overcome this challenge with the newly developed, ready-for-market mioty® wireless low-power wide-area transmission system. The team receives the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize, which is awarded to employees of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft for their outstanding scientific achievements in solving application-related problems.

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The German Society for Non-Destructive Testing (DGZfP) has awarded Wolfgang Holub, Chief Engineer at the Fraunhofer Development Center X-ray Technology EZRT of Fraunhofer IIS, with the User Award 2020. The prize was presented to him for his research on the topic of "Robot-based computed tomography on large components in automotive engineering" during the virtual DGZfP annual conference.

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The German Institute of Navigation (DGON) has presented the Christian Hülsmeyer Award to Prof. Joachim Ender, former institute director of Fraunhofer FHR and radar expert. With the award, named after radar pioneer Christian Hülsmeyer, DGON recognizes Prof. Ender‘s outstanding contributions to radar research and education.

Fiber-based Frequency Modulated LiDAR With MEMS Scanning Capability for Long-range Sensing in Automotive Applications.

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Sarah Cwalina, research associate at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), received this year’s Best Paper Award during the recent international IEEE MetroAutomotive Workshop. Together with her co-authors, she was recognized for the »Best Paper Presented by a Young Researcher«. Cwalina works at the institute’s »Photonic Networks and Systems« department.

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The jury of TOTAL E-QUALITY Deutschland e.V. has once again granted the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut the TOTAL E-QUALITY distinction. With this award, the association recognizes the ongoing commitment to equal opportunities and the targeted measures for successful implementation. FBH received this award for the first time in June 2009. The certificate was presented in October.

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Mario Lehwald, Chairman of the Management Board of the Employment Agency Berlin South, has been awarded by the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut for its "outstanding commitment to vocational training". He presented the official certificate for the promotion of young talents 2020/21 to the training supervisors Marlies Gielow and Marvin Schilling. The Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) has been training three to four young people per year for almost 30 years, and from 1998 onwards, particularly in microtechnology.

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New sound technologies make it possible to craft highly realistic audio experiences in which the sound comes from all sides – even from above. Sound engineer Daniela Rieger completed her Master of Engineering at Stuttgart Media University and is part of the team in the Media Systems and Applications department at Fraunhofer IIS, where she works to optimize these types of audio formats.

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Prize-winning semiconductor technology: The Fraunhofer Institutes IAF and IIS together with the University of Freiburg/INATECH win second place with their joint project »EdgeLimit – Evaluation of Power Electronics in Modern Edge Cloud Systems« in the innovation competition »Electronics for Energy-Saving Information and Communications Technology« launched by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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The Fraunhofer Institutes IIS and IAF together with the University of Freiburg/INATECH win second place with their joint project “EdgeLimit – Evaluation of Power Electronics in Modern Edge Cloud Systems” in the innovation competition “Electronics for Energy-Saving Information and Communications Technology” launched by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project consortium is funded by the BMBF to realize their solution for energy-saving mobile radio base stations.

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Amelie Hagelauer received the IEEE Ultrasonics Early Career Investigator Award For outstanding Contributions fo the design and characterization of acoustic wave devices for wireless communications.

The "Fraunhofer Versatile Video Encoder " (VVenC) software developed by Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) won first place at the "Best Open Source Project Awards". Award winners were announced during this year's IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME). VVenC is a fast and efficient encoder implementation of the video coding standard H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) released last year. The VVenC open source project was realized by a research team from Fraunhofer HHI’s "Video Communication and Applications"department under the leadership of Adam Wieckowski.

Oliver Ambacher receives the Rudolf Jaeckel Prize of the German Vacuum Society in recognition of »pioneering contributions to the progress of power electronic systems«.

Dr. Julietta Förthner, scientist at Fraunhofer IISB, was awarded a dissertation prize from the STAEDTLER-Stiftung. She received the prize for her thesis "Lateral and vertical charge compensation structures in 4H silicon carbide".

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Kevin Ehrensberger, who completed his training as a microtechnologist at Fraunhofer IISB in July 2021 with a grade of "very good," was honored at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's "Ehrung der Besten" ceremony on November 3 and 4, 2021.

TU Clausthal student Luise Hoffmann received the "Applied Photonics Award" for her master’s thesis entitled "Fabrication and characterization of femtosecond laser-alloyed nickel mesh electrodes for alkaline water electrolysis". Professors Wolfgang Schade and Eike Hübner from the "Fiber Optical Sensor Systems" department at the Goslar site of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) co-supervised the thesis. According to TU Clausthal, the method developed within the master's thesis shows great potential for realizing new material compounds and structures with simple process steps for a wide range of applications.

Johannes Gehring, scientist at Fraunhofer IISB, was awarded the EnCN Energy Prize 2021 for his master's thesis "Development and Characterization of a Dual Active Bridge with GaN Transistors".

The media group Thomson Reuters has recognized two scientific papers from the "Artificial Intelligence" department of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI). They received the labels "highly cited" and "hot paper" in the fields of "Engineering" and "Computer Science".  The honored publications deal with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in anomaly detection and communication optimization of federated learning systems.

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The publication »783 nm wavelength stabilized DBR tapered diode lasers with a 7 W output power« authored by Bernd Sumpf, Lara Sophie Theurer, Martin Maiwald, André Müller, André Maaßdorf, Jörg Fricke, Peter Ressel, and Günther Tränkle has been selected as Editor's Pick by the Applied Optics Editorial Office: »Editor's Picks serve to highlight articles with excellent scientific quality and are representative of the work taking place in a specific field.«

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Franz Selbmann was awarded the Bruce Deal and Andy Grove Young Author Award 2021 at the 242nd meeting of ECS - The Electrochemical Society in Atlanta, Georgia/USA.
He received the award for his work on "Low-Temperature Parylene-Based Adhesive Bonding Technology for 150 and 200 mm Wafers for Fully Biocompatible and Highly Reliable Microsystems".
Franz Selbmann also presented recent results on ultra-thin parylene-based printed circuit boards as a new platform for flexible sensors and wearables.
The Bruce Deal & Andy Grove Young Author Award recognizes the best paper by a young author published in the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS).

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For their start-up project HyPhoX, the scientists Dr. Patrick Steglich and Prof. Dr. Andreas Mai from the Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics, IHP, in Frankfurt Oder received the Leibniz Founding Award 2021. The award-winning project provides a universal analysis tool for liquids in the health and environmental sectors based on a patented photonic sensor. To further support their project, the founders will receive an earmarked prize money of 25.000 euros.

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Dr. Matthias Weiß has been awarded the Sensors and Electronics Technology (SET) Panel Excellence Award by NATO. In their citation, NATO recognizes his outstanding contribution as a member of the SET-236 Task Group „Design and Analysis of Compressive Sensing Techniques for Radar and ESM Applications“, that enhanced the visibility of the Sensors and Electronics Technology Panel and is a major Benefit for the NATO community. 

Hazem Mesilhy, PhD student at Fraunhofer IISB, together with his co-authors from IISB and ASML, received the "Photronics Best Student Paper Award" at the "2021 SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography" conference for the paper „Pathfinding the Perfect EUV Mask: Understanding the EUV Mask Using the Hybrid Mask Model“.

Decai Chen, research associate in the “Immersive Media and Communication” group of the “Vision and Imaging Technologies” department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), was awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2021 International Conference on 3D Immersion (IC3D). Together with his co-authors, he was able to prevail against three other nominated papers. The award-winning paper "Accurate Human Body Reconstruction for Volumetric Video" focuses on the use of deep-learning-based multi-view stereo networks to achieve high-fidelity human body reconstruction in volumetric video production.

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Prof. Slawomir Stanczak, head of the “Wireless Communications and Networks” department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), was honored by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) with the “Certificate of Appreciation”. The certificate recognizes his outstanding work as chairman of the “ITU-T Focus Group on Machine Learning for Future Networks including 5G”. Prof. Stanczak has contributed significantly to the international standardization work on the promising 5G technology. The focus group was established by ITU-T Study Group 13 at its meeting in Geneva, November 6-17, 2017. An architecture developed by the focus group was standardized before the official end of the working group.

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Prof. Bjoern Globisch, group leader of the "Terahertz Sensor Systems" research group in the Photonic Components department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), has won this year's Karl Scheel Prize awarded by the Physical Society of Berlin (PGzB). This regional association of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft e. V.) recognizes with this most prestigious prize the outstanding scientific achievements of their members made in the years immediately following their doctorate. Since 1958, the 5,000€ prize has been awarded to 80 scientists.

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At the Product of the Year awards ceremony of the trade journal "Elektronik", the RISC-V-Core EMSA5-FS developed by Fraunhofer IPMS won in the category "Automotive".

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For the award-winning paper, van Dijk and his colleagues investigated aging effects in printed circuit boards used for 5G and radar applications. PCB samples were aged at 175°C and changes were diagnosed using material characterization techniques. Using finite element analysis, the IZM researchers* developed a method to continuously describe the material changes, i.e. the aging process. This enables a more realistic assessment of reliability.

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"Yarman-Carlin Award", Second Prize for Aniello Franzese and his paper "Doherty Power Amplifier with a Novel Power Divider for 5G mm-Wave"

awarded Mediterranean Microwave Symposium 2022

May 9-13, 2022

Pizzo Calabro, Italy

At the "45th International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology", Hanying Wen from Fraunhofer IPMS won the Best Paper Award for Young Scientist. The award was given for her publication entitled "Improved Nearinfrared Photoresponse of Si-based Schottky Diode by Nanophotonic Structures".

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The T-TST Best Paper Award 2022 of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) goes to a team of authors from Fraunhofer IAF: Laurenz John, Axel Tessmann, Arnulf Leuther, Philipp Neininger, Thomas Merkle and Thomas Zwick (KIT) are awarded for their paper "Broadband 300-GHz Power Amplifier MMICs in InGaAs mHEMT Technology". The T-TST Best Paper Award is given annually to the most significant paper published in the scientific journal "IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology". The award was presented in June 2022 at the International Microwave Symposium in Denver, Colorado.

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At the 37th European Mask and Lithography Conference (EMLC) in Leuven (Belgium), the organizing committee awarded the title "Talents in Photomask Industry" for the sixth time. The award has recognized students for outstanding research in the field of photomask manufacturing since 2016. In 2022, this honor was bestowed upon Cansu Hanim Canpolat-Schmidt by Carl Zeiss Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology GmbH. Canpolat-Schmidt is a student at Chemnitz University of Technology in the international Micro and Nano Systems program. The award was presented to her on June 22, 2022 for her conference paper "Lithographic Performance of Resist ma-N 1402 in an E-beam/i-line Stepper Intra-level Mix and Match Approach."

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The Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS annually awards the Fraunhofer ENAS Research Award for outstanding scientific results with high application relevance. In 2021, the prize went to Dr.-Ing. Chris Stöckel, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering. He receives the award for his research work in the field of piezoelectric microsystems, which is among the top research on a national and international scale. Dr. Chris Stöckel is the spiritual father of this MEMS platform established at the Chemnitz site.

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Every year since 2017, Siemens Healthineers has been hosting the Global Supplier Day. At last year’s event on 22 June, awards were given out by Siemens Healthineers for excellent suppliers as a sign of appreciation for strategic partners and key suppliers. The award for the »Technology & Innovation« category went to Fraunhofer IZM ASSID for its many years of reliable cooperation with Siemens Healthineers and production of electronic components for power converters.

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Scientists from the departments "Photonic Networks and Systems" and "Photonic Components" of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) are the winners of this year's European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference (EuMIC) Prize. The research team received the award for their paper "120 GBd SiGe-Based 2:1 Analog Multiplexer Module for Ultra-Broadband Transmission Systems." In this paper, Fraunhofer HHI’s photonics experts present the Analog Multiplexer Module jointly developed with researchers from the University of Stuttgart.

For over two decades, Lars Böttcher has helped electronic systems become smaller, more reliable, and better at handling high frequencies through his work on embedding chips in circuit boards. With his team and many industry partners, he has brought the former niche technology into the mainstream and paved its way into exciting new applications in the automotive sector, medical technology, or even consumer electronics. In recognition of these efforts, he was chosen as the recipient of the 2021 Fraunhofer IZM Research Award. Due to the COVID pandemic, the official presentation was postponed until June 23, 2022.

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Alongside the Research Award presented at the ceremony on 23 June 2022, Fraunhofer IZM has awarded its first communication prize in recognition of special achievements in communicating the Institute’s work to the wider public. The prize’s first recipient is Manuel Bäuscher, a researcher whose exceptional work in publicizing the work of Fraunhofer IZM won in the »Demonstrator« category. Bäuscher and his team developed a graphene oxide quick test for a range of biomarkers in blood samples. The exhibits and illustrations he produced for the GraphPOC project were praised for their creativity, persuasiveness and relevance for society.

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Lennart Jehle, long-time working student in the "Photonic Components" (PC) department of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), has received the student prize of the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin (Berlin Physical Society, PGzB). The award ceremony took place on July 14, 2022 in Berlin. The PGzB Physics Study Prize is awarded annually to outstanding graduates of the master's degree program in physics.

Michelle Fribance, student assistant at Fraunhofer IISB was awarded the Hans-Wilhelm-Renkhoff-Preis for her bachelor thesis "Investigation of surrogate modeling to optimize the stability of DC networks".

Sukhrob Abdulazhanov et. al from Fraunhofer IPMS received the Excellent Paper Award for the paper "Investigation of BEoL Integrated Ferroelectric Thin-Film HfO2 for mm Wave Varactor Applications" at the IEEE International Symposium on Radio-Frequency Integration Technology 2022 in Busan, Korea.in Busan, Korea.

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Dr. Stephan Palm received the DLR Dissertation Award 2022 for his dissertation »Mapping of urban scenes by single-channel mmW FMCW SAR on circular flight and curved car trajectories«. 

IEEE-PIMRC 2022 Track Paper Award for Alireza Hasani, Lukasz Lopacinski, Milos Krstic and Eckhard Grass for the paper "1542 Gbps Fully Pipelined Fast-SSC Decoding of Polar Codes"

awarded at IEEE PIMRC 2022: IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications 2022

September 12-15, 2022

Virtual Conference

As part of ESTC 2022, another award went to a member of the Fraunhofer IZM team: Rolf Aschenbrenner, head of the »System Integration & Interconnection Technologies« department won the IEEE Region 8 Award in Sibiu in recognition of his excellent contribution to strengthening the impact and development of the EPS program. With the award, the hosts drew particular attention to Rolf Aschenbrenner’s contributions in the field of electronic packaging and system integration in Europe in the form of his technical expertise, his contributions at international conferences, and his active presence in the communities in the field.

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At Electronics System Integration Technology Conference 2022 our colleague Steffen Bickel, researcher at Fraunhofer IZM-ASSID in Dresden, won the Best Paper Award for his contribution on “Metallurgical Aspects and Joint Properties of Cu-Ni-In-Cu Fine-pitch Interconnects for 3D Integration”.

In his paper, he investigates the kinetic mechanisms at work during phase formation at the nickel – indium border, a space of only a few micrometers in size that is critical for the creation of electrically and mechanically reliable interconnects. His insights are already being used for the production of intermetallic fine-pitch interconnects that show the potential and the limitations of the nickel barrier. 

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During the 19^th Conference on Gettering and Defect Engineering in Semiconductor Technology, short GADEST, IHP scientist Costanza Manganelli received the Young Scientist Award. She presented her work “A comprehensive analysis of thermo-opto-mechanical properties of Germanium micro-structures”. The related activity is a result of a collaboration with Universita’ di Pisa, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Universita’ di Roma Tre, and IHP. At IHP, Costanza Manganelli worked with her colluegue Ignatii Zaitsev and got the supervision of Dr. Davide Spirito.

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Tom Rothe won the Doi Award for the best student paper at ICPT 2022 - the International Conference on Planarization Technology - for his paper "A hybrid chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) model for time-dependent, spatial removal rate optimization."
The ICPT 2022 - International Conference on Planarization Technology - was held from September 27 - 29, 2022, in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., with 400 in-person and 200 online attendees. The Doi Award is granted for the best student paper and is named after Prof. Dr. Toshiro K. Doi, one of the pioneers of CMP, who was honored for his life's work at ICPT2022.

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Ingo Hoyer received the first place Student Award at BMT 2022 (Joint Annual Conference of the Austrian, German and Swiss Societies for Biomedical Engineering) . The paper "Inference runtime of a neural network to detect atrial fibrillation on customized RISC-V-based hardware" is part of his master thesis and deals with disease detection using RISC-V-based hardware. The work was supervised at Fraunhofer IMS by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karsten Seidl and at TU Darmstadt by KIS*MED (Artificial Intelligence Systems of Medicine) and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Hoog Antink.

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Alireza Rezaei took 2nd place in the "3D/Component Design" category for his work on the Fraunhofer lead project ZEPOWEL (Towards Zero Power Electronics). In this project, nine Fraunhofer institutes successfully demonstrated how sensor systems can consume extremely little power or function completely autonomously, thus saving up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions nationwide.

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Dr. René Kirrbach from Fraunhofer IPMS won the Applied Photonics Award 2022 of Fraunhofer IOF with his dissertation "Investigations on linear optical-wireless front-ends and application-specific free-form lenses for optical-wireless communication".

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ECS Best Student Presentation Award for Ketan Anand and his paper "Lateral Selective SiGe Growth for Dislocation-Free Virtual Substrate Fabrication"

awarded at 242nd ECS Meeting, G03 Symposium: SiGe, Ge and Related Materials: Materials, Processing and Devices

October 9-13, 2022

Atlanta, USA

Stagun received the award for his contribution on “Adhesive Bonding – Reliable Integration of Electronics Modules in Textiles” that investigated the means to integrate electronics in textile objects. For the evolution of smart textiles, a way has to be found to achieve the robust integration of electronics in textile substrates. In his paper, Stagun explored the adhesive bonding technology that works without soldering or crimping for the mechanical and electrical integration of modules in fabrics in a single step. To copy the approach from conventional electronics production to the special conditions of textiles, Fraunhofer IZM and the Key Research Area Microperipheral Technologies at the Technical University of Berlin developed a textile bonder that combines processing parameters that work on textile fabrics with the precision required in electronic interconnections.

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Dr. Stefan Ehrlich, scientist at Fraunhofer IISB, received a "First Place Prize Paper Award" from the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. He wrote the award-winning paper "Fast Numerical Power Loss Calculation for High-frequency Litz Wires" together with his co-authors Dr. Hans Rossmanith, Marco Sauer, Dr. Christopher Joffe and Prof. Martin März.

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For their commitment to providing effective support for female students at Fraunhofer IZM, Christina Lopper and Michael Schiffer have been honored with the »BestChance« award for 2022. Christina Lopper had recognized that women have long been underrepresented at all levels of the Fraunhofer IZM, prompting her to investigate the causes in conversations with students leaving the Institute. One of her findings was that many of the female students were missing a meaningful link between their practical work at the Institute and their study topics. They lacked prospects and were rarely spoken to about possible career opportunities and conditions. Christina Lopper also asked herself whether female students at the Institute should be more visible and more effectively employed as an important talent pool in times of constrained labor markets. Her idea was the creation of a dedicated support program for female students – Young Research Talent Class »Women in Science«, developed by Christina Lopper and Michael Schiffer and run by her ever since.

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Mohammed-Ali Sheikh wins the Innovation Award for Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen, sponsored by Sparkasse Niederrhein, for his master's thesis in the field of biosensor technology based on functionalised carbon nanotubes, which show a fluorescence response in the near-infrared range. Among other things, this offers new possibilities for the rapid diagnosis of viruses and bacteria. The work was supervised by Prof. Dr. Karsten Seidl and Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kruss from the Fraunhofer IMS.

The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) is well-distinguished for its expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI). As a result, the BIFOLD leading researchers Prof. Wojciech Samek, Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller and Prof. Grégoire Montavon were now honored by the journal Digital Signal Processing (DSP) with the 2022 Best Paper Prize. Importantly, the DSP mention of excellence highlights research findings published within the last five years. Awarding the article entitled “Methods for interpreting and understanding deep neural networks” (2018), DSP accentuates the scientists’ outstanding work on the interpretability of AI models.

Tobias Beckerwerth, research associate in the Photonic Components department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), was honored with the IPC Best Student Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Photonics Conference. The PhD candidate was able to prevail against four other nominated papers. His award-winning article “High-Speed Waveguide Integrated Avalanche Photodiode on InP” emphasizes the development of integrated photodiodes for high-speed operation with increased sensitivity.

Michael Basler, scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF, has won the SEMIKRON Young Engineer Award 2022 for his research in the field of “monolithic integration of GaN power circuits.”

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The Fraunhofer IIS Mobile Health Lab is one of 13 consortium partners for the TEAM-X project, which was awarded the Living Lab innovation prize by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action on May 31, 2022. TEAM-X aims to pave the way for forward-looking health and nursing care provision.

Prof. Ute Schmid, head of the Comprehensible AI group at Fraunhofer IIS and Professor of Applied Computer Science focusing on cognitive systems at the University of Bamberg, was named one of four new EurAI Fellows.

Martina Simon of our Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services and her co-authors won the Scientific Conference Autism Spectrum (WTAS) Best Poster Award for their work titled “Acceptance of Robot-Assisted Therapies for Children on the Autism Spectrum and Assessment of Associated Ethical and Social Aspects.”

Sascha Dick from the Audio and Media Technologies division was made an AES Fellow in recognition of his work on a new kind of educational website about audio coding artefacts.

Jann Goschenhofer, who works at our Center for Applied Research on Supply Chain Services, and his coauthors received the First Work- shop on Ever Evolving NLP Best Paper Award for their paper “CC-Top: Constrained Clustering for Dynamic Topic Discovery.”

As part of the University of Passau’s Dies academicus on November 11, 2022, Dr. Thomas Lang from our Development Center X-ray Technology was among those awarded the Dissertation Prize for his outstanding work titled “Al-Supported Interactive Segmentation of 3D Volumes.”

Jan Erik Liedtke (Fraunhofer ENAS)

Andy Heinig and Gunjanben Limbachiya from our Engineering of Adaptive Systems EAS division received the Best Paper Award at CadenceLIVE Europe 2022 for “Development of Radar Algorithm for the Tensilica Processor.”

Prof. Meinard Müller and his team were awarded 1.25 million euros in funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Reinhart Koselleck program of projects. The funded project on music data analysis is being carried out at the International Audio Laboratories.

Sebastian Kram, Christopher Kraus, Maximilian Stahlke, Dr. Tobias Feigl, Prof. Jörn Thielecke and Dr. Christopher Mutschler from the Positioning and Networks division won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE WCNC for “Delay Estimation in Dense Multipath Environ- ments using Time Series Segmentation.”

Johannes Rossouw van der Merve and his co-authors Inigo Cortes Vidal, Dr. Fabio Garzia, Alexander Rügamer and Dr. Wolfgang Felber received the Institute of Navigation Best Presentation Award for their paper “Exotic FMCW Waveform Mitigation with an Advanced Multipara- meter Adaptive Notch Filter (MPANF).”

Dr. Maja Taseska won the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Best PhD Award for her thesis on “Informed Spatial Filters for Speech Enhancement.”

Marie Eckert, Thomas Robotham, Prof. Emanuël Habets and Olli Rummukainen received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA) 2022 for their work titled “Pupillary Light Reflex Correction for Robust Pupillometry in Virtual Reality.”

Anna Leschanowsky and Luca Resti from our Audio and Media Technologies research area were honored by Siemens AG’s Corporate Technology department for their outstanding academic performance in information and communications technology.

For his outstanding work in the group SET-232/SET-236 »Design and Analysis of Compressive Sensing Techniques for Radar, ESM and Electro-Optical Systems« Dr. Matthias Weiß has been awarded the NATO STO Excellence Award 2022.

IHP’s PhD student Tommaso Rizzi received the Best Student Paper Award at the renowned IEEE International Integrated Reliability Workshop 2022, taking place at the Stanford Sierra Conference Center in Fallen Leaf Lake, USA. He presented his work "Exploring Process-Voltage-Temperature Variations Impact on 4T1R Multiplexers for Energy-aware Resistive RAM-based FPGAs" as a result of a long-term collaboration between IHP, Università degli Studi di Ferrara and Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

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Dr. Agnes Bußmann, Group leader at Fraunhofer EMFT, was awarded the 1. Hugo-Geiger-Prize at Fraunhofer "Netzwert" Symposium on March 21st 2023. The prize is awarded yearly by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and state Bavaria to three excellent promotions in applied research. Agnes Bußmann's dissertation focuses on the use of MEMS micropumps for various medical applications, thus combining scientific excellence with enterpreneurial spirit.

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Tom Rothe received the Best Student Paper Award of the apc|m Europe Conference 2023 for his paper "Can empirical physics models improve machine learning performance using planarization data?" The two Program Committee Speakers of the apc|m Martin Schellenberger and Jochen Kinauer handed him the award on March 30, 2023 at the conference in Bruges, Belgium.
Tom Rothe is currently doing his PhD at Fraunhofer ENAS in Chemnitz on physical models, which he combines with modern machine learning methods to resilient process models of chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP).

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Since 1978, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has awarded annual prizes for outstanding scientific achievements by its employees. These awards are for achievements that have practical applications and a potential to directly and decisively help solve societal challenges and safeguard the future of Germany as a business location. In 2023 Dr. Bert Kaiser and Dr. Sergiu Langa from Fraunhofer IPMS and Holger Conrad from Bosch Sensortec GmbH were awarded with the price for their project "Speaker technology – energy-efficient micro speakers for in-ear headphones".

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Dr. Wilfried Lerch from Fraunhofer EMFT was awarded the best paper award for his paper «Manufacturing of Nanosheets and Multilayer Nanogaps in Silicon» in the 243rd ECS Meeting and 18th International Symposium on Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC-XVIII), which took place on May 28 - June 02 2023,  in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

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Simon Lang from Fraunhofer EMFT was awarded the best presentation award for the presentation of his paper «Aluminium Josephson Junction Formation on 200 mm Wafers Using Different Oxidation Techniques» in the 243rd ECS Meeting and 18th International Symposium on Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC-XVIII), which took place on May 28 - June 02 2023,  in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

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The Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS annually awards the Fraunhofer ENAS Research Award for outstanding scientific results with high application relevance. This year the prize belongs to Franz Selbmann. He receives the award for his research work on the development of a technology platform based on Parylene as a functional material for sensory functionalities, for adhesive wafer bonding as well as for flexible packaging.

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Sepideh M. Kouhini, research associate at Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), completed her dissertation ‘Integrated Optical Wireless Communication and Positioning by Using Distributed Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)’ at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) with the final mark “magna cum laude”.

Together with his co-authors, Dr. Jan Wessel was awarded the Microwave Prize 2023 for the paper »Multimode W-Band and D-Band MIMO Scalable Radar Platform« (IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, Vol. 69, Issue: 1, pp. 1036-1047, January 2021). 

Sean D'Silva, PhD student at Fraunhofer IISB, received the "ZEISS Award for Talents in Photomask Industry" for his paper “Predicting resist pattern collapse in EUV lithography using machine learning”. It was selected as the best student paper at the 38th European Mask and Lithography Conference in Dresden. In the paper, Sean D'Silva and his co-authors employ machine learning to predict the dependence of the probability for resist pattern collapse on resist material properties, feature density, and profile shape.

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Prof. Christoph Kutter, Director of Fraunhofer EMFT, has been awarded by the GMM.

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Prof. Dr. Karsten Seidl from Fraunhofer IMS was re-elected as a member of the board of the German Society for Biomedical Engineering in the VDE at the beginning of February 2022 and was appointed as chairman of the board of the society as of 01.10.2023. In the view of the VDE DGBMT, optimal use of digitization, artificial intelligence and networking will create technologies that can create solutions against the backdrop of an increasing shortage of skilled workers. For example, a boost in innovation is expected for the use of robotics in the operating room and nursing care, the field of mobile health, and personalized medicine, among others. Prof. Seidl sums up: "In the interest of patients, we want to help shape Germany as a center of science and the biomedical technology of the future. In order to successfully tackle this task, we need to promote active and young scientists - we will also work on this."

The IEEE Tatsuo Itoh Award 2023 of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) goes to two scientists of Fraunhofer IAF: Dr. Fabian Thome and Dr. Arnulf Leuther are awarded for their paper “A 75–305-GHz Power Amplifier MMIC With 10–14.9-dBm Pout in a 35-nm InGaAs mHEMT Technology.” The IEEE Tatsuo Itoh Award is presented annually to the most significant paper in the IEEE Microwave and Wireless Component Letters. The award ceremony will take place in June at the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium 2023 in San Diego, CA.

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Audio technology — customized listening experiences in 3D: Whether streaming music and movies, watching TV or in the car: The MPEG-H Audio system makes it possible to fully immerse yourself in soundscapes and adjust them to your own preferences. Three researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS — representing a large team — are being awarded the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023 for this development. The prize is awarded to employees of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft for their outstanding scientific achievements in solving application-related problems.

Turn up the volume on the TV movie dialogue, lower the background noise? Select your favorite sport commentator at the touch of a button? Or turn the drums down a bit while listening to music? The MPEG-H Audio system from the Fraunhofer IIS makes it easy to personalize 3D sound. For the development of the system, Harald Fuchs, Dr. Achim Kuntz and Adrian Murtaza — representing the team — will be awarded the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize 2023

Torsten Ohlenforst, Moritz Schreiber, Felix Kreyß and Dr. Manuel Schrauth from the Communication Systems department received the Best Paper Award of the “International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI) 2023” for their paper “Enabling Distributed Inference of Large Neural Networks on Resource Constrained Edge Devices Using Ad Hoc Networks”.

Dr. Sascha Dick and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Herre from the Audio and Media Technologies division received the AES Best Technical Paper Award at the 155th Audio Engineering Society Convention for their paper “Investigation of the Impact of Spectral Cues from Torso Shadowing on Front-Back Confusion and Perceived Differences along Cones of Confusion”.

At the “Computational Humanities Research (CHR)” conference, Prof. Dr. Meinard Müller and Prof. Dr. Christof Weiß from the Audio and Media Technologies division received the Best Paper Award for their paper “Studying Tonal Evolution of Western Choral Music: A Corpus-Based Strategy”.

At the “International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM) 2023”, Rene Dorsch, Michael Freund and Prof. Dr. Andreas Harth from our Working Group for Supply Chain Services, among others, received the Best Workshop Paper Award for their paper on “Breaking Down Barriers with Knowledge Graphs: Data Integration for Cross-Organizational Process Mining”.

Jonathan Ott, Maximilian Stahlke, Dr. Tobias Feigl, Sebastian Kram and Dr. Christopher Mutschler from the Localization and Networking department were honored with the Best Paper Award of the “International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) 2023” for their work on “Multipath Delay Estimation in Complex Environments using Transformers”. Their results were also published in an IEEE publication in the journal “Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN)”.

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The paper “Towards a Representation Model and Fog-Based Device Orchestration for Audio-Centric Pervasive Storytelling” by Prof. Marcelo Moreno DSc and Prof. Dr. Nils Peters from the Audio and Media Technologies division has received the Best Paper Award at the “International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds (IoS)” in Pisa.

Mp3 co-creator Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg has been awarded the Digital Processing Medal by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) for his pioneering work in audio coding.

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Prof. Dr. Meinard Müller, an expert in semantic audio signal processing, was named FAU Innovator 2023 in the “Research” category by the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU).

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Dr. Andreas Brendel from the Audio and Media Technologies division was honored with the VDE Bayern Award 2023 for his dissertation “Acoustic Signal Processing – Optimizing Hearing Aids or Telephone Conferences”.

Dr Maximilian Lederer won the Alfred Kuhlenkamp Prize of the VDE GMM (Society for Microelectronics, Microsystems and Precision Engineering) for his work on "Material development of doped hafnium oxide for non-volatile ferroelectric memories". It is the highest honour that the GMM awards to young researchers.

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Hanying Wen was awarded the "Best Paper Award for Young Scientist" at the 46th International Spring Seminar on Electronics Technology (ISSE) for her paper "Characterisation of AlSiCu/TiN/p-Si Schottky Contacts with Nanophotonic Structures for Near-Infrared Photodetectors".

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Sourav De, Franz Müller, Nellie Laleni, Maximilian Lederer, Yannick Raffel and Shaown Mojumber from the Center Nanoelectronic Technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute IPMS have received the George E. Smith Prize 2022 for their paper "Demonstration of Multiply-Accumulate Operation With 28 nm FeFET Crossbar Array". The MAC operation was carried out in cooperation with GlobalFoundries' 28 nanometre technology.

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Prof Dr Rüdiger Quay was elected as a member of the Executive Board of the Information Technology Society (ITG) of the VDE. The institute director of Fraunhofer IAF is thus one of a total of nine board members and belongs to the group of service providers, network operators and research institutes.

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Researchers from Fraunhofer IAF, Fraunhofer IPM and Fraunhofer IKTS have received the 2023 IEEE JESTPE First Place Prize Paper Award for their work on ultra-efficient power electronics for electrocaloric heat pumps. The paper was written as part of the Fraunhofer lighthouse project "ElKaWe" ("Electrocaloric Heat Pumps").

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Tobias Naber, PhD student at the Fraunhofer EMFT, won the prize with his presentation "TER-Ox: Simultaneous Monitoring of Epithelial Barrier Function and Respiration".

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The AI-NET project was presented with the prestigious "CELTIC-NEXT Innovation Award" at the Berlin 6G Conference, which took place from 2 to 4 July 2024. The prize is awarded by CELTIC-NEXT, an industry-driven initiative for ICT technologies with a focus on secure and sustainable communication.

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In his dissertation on superiorization methodology, Dr Finck deals with the inexact solution of optimisation problems with very little computational effort. By using this approach in mobile communication, it is possible to utilise the spectrum more efficiently and reduce energy consumption.

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Prof. Slawomir Stanczak and the 6G-RIC team win the "Best Exhibition Award - Technology in End-to-End Systems" at the 6G Summit in Dresden with their live demonstrator for D-band sensor technology.

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Sylvain Renault, project manager at the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), received the Best Poster Award at the tenth "International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management". His paper "Dynamic Exposure Visualization of Air Quality Data with Augmented Reality", which he wrote together with his co-authors, deals with the use of augmented reality (AR) for the user-friendly visualization of environmental information such as air quality or traffic data. 

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The Fernseh- und Kinotechnische Gesellschaft (FKTG) honored researchers from the Vision and Imaging Technologies (VIT) department of Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) for their achievement in the development of "3D Human Body Reconstruction" (3D HBR) as a basic technology for volumetric scanning.

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Cognitive systems expert Dr Sebastian Bosse has received the Outstanding Editorial Board Member Award from the journal IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

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Dr. Heiner Kirchhoffer was honoured with the ISO/IEC Excellence Award for his contributions as editor of the Neural Network Coding standard! NNC provides billions of people with neural network coding tools for fast and interoperable deep learning solutions.

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Sophie Pientka won the Best Presentation Award at this year's Summer School on Video Coding and Processing (SVCP 2024). In her contribution, she presented the latest developments in the coding of biomedical waveform data.

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Prof. Ivan Ndip was honoured with the IMAPS Outstanding Educator Award 2024 for his contribution to education and training in packaging technology.

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Team from Fraunhofer and OSRAM nominated for the German Future Prize. Turning the car headlight into a projector - Fraunhofer IZM and its project partner ams-OSRAM have been nominated for the German Future Prize for the technological realisation of this idea.

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Nyake Gahein-Sama was recognized for his contribution on “Alignment Between Subsequent 3D Molding Layers for Optimized Performance of 3D Integrated Patch Antennas for Advanced Sensing Applications”.

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Wenzel received the award for her paper "Influence of Heat Treatment on the Quality of Die-to-Wafer Hybrid Bond Interconnects", which she submitted as a technical paper and presented on site as a poster. The paper examines the effects of certain process influences during hybrid bonding, a technology that has become increasingly important in the semiconductor industry in recent decades.

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Dr Thomas Kämpfe was presented with the Dresden Excellence Award on 11 March. The prize was awarded for his habilitation thesis "Electron Devices Based on Ferroelectric Hafnium Oxide Thin Films". His work provides an overview of the integration of ferroelectric hafnium oxide (HfO2) in the semiconductor process and its use in semiconductor devices.

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Dr Uwe Vogel has been appointed as the new Chairman of the Board of the Society For Information Display Mid-Europe Chapter (SID-MEC). The SID is an association that brings together scientists in the field of microdisplay research and promotes research with its own publications or events such as the annual Display Week.

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The team from the Center Nanoelectronic Technologies at Fraunhofer IPMS was awarded the Academia Prize for the "Conformity Research Team of the Year" in 2024, presented by the Finnish company "Chipmetric Oy" for nanotechnology. The prize was awarded for innovative cutting-edge research in the field of ferroelectric technologies in connection with atomic layer deposition and thin-film conformance research for the semiconductor industry.

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Dr Uwe Vogel was one of 44 German scientists to receive an award in Offenbach in 2024 for his dedicated work in the field of microdisplays and sensor technology. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recognised his commitment to the standardisation of working standards, methodology and quality of electronic displays.

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The publication "Portable shifted excitation Raman difference spectroscopy for on-site soil analysis" by the authors Martin Maiwald, Kay Sowoidnich and Bernd Sumpf is not only one of the top 10% of downloads, but also one of the most cited in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy.

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"Au-Free Ohmic Contact for GaN High-Electron-Mobility Transistors" by Hossein Yazdani, Serguei Chevtchenko, Frank Brunner, Günther Tränkle and Joachim Würfl is one of the most read articles in physica status solidi (a) - applications and materials science.

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The joint publication "Radiative Recombination and Carrier Injection Efficiencies in 265 nm Deep Ultraviolet Light-Emitting Diodes Grown on AlN/Sapphire Templates with Different Defect Densities" by authors from TU Berlin, FBH and IKZ is one of the top 10 downloaded publications at Physica Status Solidi (A) - Applications and Material Science.

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"High-mobility 4 μm MOVPE-grown (100) β-Ga2O3 film by parasitic particles suppression" was selected as one of the highlight papers of 2023 in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.

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"'Sawfish' Photonic Crystal Cavity for Near-Unity Emitter-to-Fiber Interfacing in Quantum Network Applications" is presented on the cover of "Advanced Optical Materials" (Volume 12, Issue 13).

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Petros Beleniotis received the Best Student Paper Award at the WOCSDICE-EXMATEC 2024 conference in Heraklion, Crete, Greece for his paper "A Computational Modeling Method for Performance Optimization of GaN HEMT" in collaboration with Christos Zervos and Matthias Rudolph.

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Nor Ammouri was awarded the Best Student Talk Award for the best presentation at the European Semiconductor Laser Workshop 2024 (ESLW) in Kassel.

In her talk, she presented 2 mm and 4 mm long broad-strip laser diodes that were operated in a nanosecond pulse driver developed at FBH. A peak pulse power of 364 W was achieved with a pulse current of only 167 A and within a narrow spectral bandwidth of less than 0.2 nm in the nanosecond range. By developing an epitaxial structure with five wavelength-stabilized active zones and four tunnel diodes, the pulse power could be increased more than threefold.

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Thomas Tenzler received the Best Student Poster Award at the European Semiconductor Laser Workshop 2024 (ESLW) in Kassel.

His poster presented simulation results of a Bragg reflection waveguide (BRW) laser in the VOMBAT project. The aim is to convert laser light at 775 nm into entangled photons at 1550 nm using spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC). The simulations showed that a frequency-selective DBR grating improves the wavelength stability of the BRW laser, which is important for phase matching.

VOMBAT is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and is carried out in cooperation with IAF Freiburg, HHI Berlin and Saarland University.

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The publication "GaAs-based photonic integrated circuit platform enabling monolithic ring-resonator-coupled lasers" by Jan-Philipp Koester et al. has been published in APL Photonics and was selected as Editor's Pick.

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Julien Kluge was awarded the poster prize at the Hot Atomic Vapor Workshop 2024 in Stuttgart. He presented a design for a rubidium two-photon frequency reference for the CRONOS payload. In the CRONOS project, partners from research and industry are developing the first space-based optical clock to be used on a small satellite in low Earth orbit.

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