QUANTIMONY also delivered a range of long term potential technological and societal benefits that will sustainably improve quality of life for the European citizen, contributing to a Europe more connected, healthier, securer, happier and environmentally sustainable.
We did so establishing the foundations of a solid knowledge exchange ecosystem amongst the main European academic and industrial actors on the field of III-Sb semiconductors paving the way for new industrial applications.
For instance:
- A crucial scientific and engineering challenge of QUANTIMONY was to develop better and more scalable infrared sources and detectors for environmental and health monitoring applications. To this respect, the project results have paved the way to develop in the future new cavity enhanced mid-infrared detectors and to integrate both active components in photonic circuits for on-chip sensing applications.
- Towards the challenge of developing new Nonvolatile Random Access Memory Technology, QUANTIMONY have strengthened the collaboration and joint activities towards the industrialization of new universal computer memories based on III-Sb. This patented technology partly developed during the project aims to take a stake of the $100 billion per year memory chip industry.
- Towards the Quantum Communication Technologies challenge, the research carried out on III-Sb quantum dots has led to new collaborations and activities in the field of single photon sources (SPS) development using III-Sb quantum dots with type I confinement and emission around 1.5 microns which was not foreseen in the proposal.
- The research done to find the optimal epitaxial growth conditions and to transfer them to industrial epitaxy reactors will play a crucial role in the scalability of any semiconductor technology in general and of those based on antimony materials in particular. The expanded knowledge on the process conditions, and the simulation of said process conditions in industrial reactors done during QUANTIMONY, will enable to straightforwardly develop products when the market requires them.
- Finally, our understanding of the intriguing electronic, optical and magnetic properties of III-Sb semiconductors has largely expanded. New software tools for multiband k.p and atomistic methods have been developed and deployed within the network to improve the characteristics of different III-Sb materials and devices, including single photon emitters, solar cells, Interband Cascade Lasers (ICL), Interband Cascade Detectors and type-II superlattices (T2SLs). Many of these new tools become now part of commercial products of our industrial software developing companies and include evolutionary methods done in QUANTIMONY which will leverage on the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), opening completely new perspectives in the future.
Many of these results will arrive to the European Semiconductor Industry within 5 years to remain competitive in transforming effective and efficient materials and architectures, designs and integration technologies into deployable products at the beginning of the semiconductor value chain. In 10 years, III-Sb technologies, like new computer memory devices developed in this project are understood as key for several downstream semiconductor industries, as well as for the creation of new SMEs linked to the development of emerging Quantum Computing and Networking Technologies.
