MINATEC in figures

Vivien Gatard graduated from Grenoble Institute of Technology’s Phelma engineering school in 2018. He recently won the French Chemistry Society’s “Master’s in Electrochemistry Internship” award for the Master’s thesis he completed during his internship at LEPMI (a lab specializing in the electrochemistry and physiochemistry of materials and interfaces). While Vivien was enrolled in the Physics-Nanosciences (PNS) program, he decided to devote his third-year internship to green hydrogen production via water electrolysis under an intense alternating magnetic field. His passion for… More information

France’s National Industrial Property Institute (INPI) released its 2018 ranking of patent filers. The CEA held on to its fourth-place ranking, coming in just behind three industrial corporations (Valeo, PSA, and Safran) with 674 patent applications published. This was the CEA’s best year ever with the exception of 2016 and 2017 (684 applications). It is also important to point out that Grenoble-based research in micro and nanoelectronics fuels a large part of the CEA’s patents—something that is not reflected in… More information

Of the 31 ERC Advanced grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to researchers in France at the end of March, five were given to researchers in Grenoble, and three went to researchers at IRIG. Martin Blackledge is investigating the structural and dynamic behavior of viral-replication machines. Renaud Demadrille is developing dye-sensitized photovoltaic cells with variable self-adjustable optical transmission. And Giovanni Finazzi is studying photosynthesis in marine plankton, which is capable of absorbing almost as much CO2 as rain… More information

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) has become a technique of choice for depositing very thin films. However, the technique does have the disadvantage of being very slow. For the first time ever, speeding up the process appears to be within reach. A recent article by David Muñoz-Rojas (LMGP), Tony Maindron (Leti), and other ALD experts outlined four approaches that  substantially reduce deposition times: batch ALD (processing several substrates simultaneously); spatial ALD (developed and used at LMGP, this approach is 100 times… More information