Ten members of the 2DFERROPLEX consortium traveled to Paris on September 2 and 3 for the first in-person meeting of the EIC EFFITRONICS portfolio, hosted at the corporate headquarters of Thales Group in Palaiseau, France. The meeting brought together around 40 representatives from the six projects that are part of the portfolio initiative to discuss the strategic roadmap of joint activities for the next three years.
The meeting opened online with welcome remarks from Isabel Obieta, Programme Manager from the European Innovation Council (EIC), who outlined the goals of the portfolio focused on on energy-efficient nanoelectronics for smart edge devices.
“The portfolio is aimed at trying to build synergies and collaborations among the projects to find opportunities for innovation,” she said. Obieta stressed that “innovation is at the centre” of the portfolio’s motivation. Chairing of the sessions then passed to Michael Bojdys, the EIC representative who will take over Obieta’s role in the coming weeks. One of the meeting’s main objectives and expected outcome was to begin drafting the main lines of the portfolio’s strategic plan.
Six projects present their work
The coordinators of the six portfolio projects then took the floor to present their initiatives, outlining their objectives and approaches and what each project could contribute to the portfolio. Presentations followed in this order: 2D-ADDICT, by Gianluca Fiori, professor at University of Pisa (UNIPI); 2DFERROPLEX, by Antoine Reserbat Plantey, CNRS researcher at Centre de Recherche sur l’Hétéro-Epitaxie et ses Applications (CRHEA); CERBERUS, by Sergi Abadal, associate professor at the UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya); CoolbrAIn, by Wilson Maia, head of Thechnology and Process Team at Thales Group; SPARK-E, by Claudia Gómez Aguirre senior researcher at Iberian Centre for Research in Energy Storage(CIIAE); and SpikeHERO, by Michael Rothe, Group Leader Embedded AI, Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS.
Four working groups, one shared agenda
The afternoon of Wednesday 2 September and the morning of Thursday 3 September were devoted to parallel sessions of the portfolio’s four Working Groups: WG1, on technical synergies across the six projects, joint benchmarking and shared methodologies; WG2, on outreach and public engagement, building a joint strategy for coordinated communication and dissemination of portfolio results; WG3, on metrics of energy consumption, developing a harmonised set of key performance indicators for energy-efficient nanoelectronic edge devices; and WG4, on IP protection and exploitation, covering a coordinated patent strategy, risk and competitive analysis, and support for exploiting portfolio results.
The meeting closed with a plenary session in which each Working Group leader presented their conclusions to the portfolio members, outlining the EFFITRONICS roadmap and setting the lines for the the first draft of the strategic plan in the short term, and defining the longer term activities proposed by each Working Group.
Beyond the formal sessions, the meeting also gave members of the six projects the chance to meet each other in person for the first time, laying the groundwork for closer collaboration within the portfolio over the coming years and, potentially, for partnerships between individual projects in the short and medium term.
EFFITRONICS is one of the portfolios set up by the European Innovation Council under its Pathfinder Challenge on Nanoelectronics for Energy-Efficient Smart Edge Devices. It brings together six EU-funded projects: 2D-ADDICT, 2DFERROPLEX, CERBERUS, CoolbrAIn, SPARK-E and SpikeHERO, with the aim of building synergies and collaboration across the group to identify opportunities for innovation in more efficient, less energy-consuming edge computing devices.
Once the portfolio meeting closed, the members of the 2DFERROPLEX project held their own internal consortium meeting to review the progress of each partner’s tasks, and set priorities for the coming months, among them, preparing the report for the project’s first reporting period.
