VISORSURF consortium

The Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) is the premier research centre in Greece, internationally acknowledged for its excellence in basic and applied research, in developing applications and products, and in providing services. Two of the six Institutes of FORTH will be contributing to this project: the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) and the Institute of Computer Science (ICS).

The Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) of FORTH at Heraklion, Crete, is an internationally recognized center of excellence in Lasers and Applications, Microelectronics and Devices, Polymer Science and Theoretical and Computational Physics. Its aim is to sustain and advance basic and applied research in carefully selected areas, and also to promote and advance technology in Greece. The “Photonic, Photonic and Metamaterials” group of IESL, which will be involved in the theoretical and computational studies of the current proposal, is among the world pioneer groups in the study of photonic crystals (PCs) and metamaterials. It is involved in the study of those materials since the birth of the related fields and it has played a critical role in many of the most important achievements in the fields. Furthermore, at FORTH there is a great fabrication expertise because of the presence of a large microelectronics group and a strong laser facility (designated as a European level facility), as well as measuring facilities covering the GHz (up to 100 GHz) and the THz region.

FORTH-ICS has a 28-year history of internationally competitive R&D contributions across the fields of Information & Communication Technologies, as well as of academic and industrial cooperation; it has adopted an evolving strategy to promote the commercial exploitation of R&D results by providing services, licensing products to industrial partners, contracting with industrial partners to jointly develop new products, and participating in spin-off companies and joint ventures. FORTH-ICS represents Greece in the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The Institute ranked first among all Greek institutes of its field in both of the two national evaluation rounds so far. FORTH-ICS participates in the project through the Telecommunications and Networks (TNL) and the Distributed Computing Systems (DCS) laboratories.

FORTH is a world-class player in the field of metamaterial through IESL and has major presence in ICT through FORTH-ICS, with a repertoire covering the complete OSI stack and system design. Therefore, it is assigned the primarily role of merging metasurfaces and ICT, producing the specifications for HSFs.

The University of Cyprus (UCY), located in Nicosia, is a young (established in 1992) and rapidly expanding university. UCY today has over 7000 students (undergraduate and postgraduate), and 450 faculty and staff. UCY has a high selectivity in undergraduate admissions (1 out of 10 applications); Successful competitive research funding (2:1 ratio over state investment); During 2013 the University received in excess of 10 million euro external funding. In 2013 UCY was implementing 101 programs funded by European and international sources, including 7 ERC frontier research grants, and 231 programs funded by national sources; Significant scholarly production of 3.1 peer-reviewed publications per faculty/year and international recognition of its research in the Science Citation Index (SCI), well above the average for Mediterranean universities. Although a few years old, the UCY library boasts 300,000 books and is purchasing books at a rate of 12000 books per annum. The electronic library resources include “IEEEXplore”. UCY research policy adopts the declarations of the European Commission for balancing basic and applied research, and introduces independent external evaluations of each department (every five years), and provides the necessary administrative support to the academic and research staff of the University. The Department of Computer Science (CS) has a full-time staff of 21 faculty members and over 75 full-time researchers. The Department has a strong research infrastructure including high-performance networks, clusters and storage area networks, cloud computing facilities, smart-phones and sensing devices. Over the last 6 years, the CS Department was involved in more than 130 research projects funded from both the European Union and the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation with total funding of over 13 million euros. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) was established in 2003. In a relatively short period of time it managed to establish high quality research, teaching and outreach activities. It currently has 17 full-time academic staff, and this number is projected to rise over the coming years, with approximately 60 postgraduate and 200 undergraduate students. In the first five years of its existence, the faculty was awarded more than 40 research projects and grants in diverse fields, with a combined budget of approximately 4 million euros. This funding success continues, and is vital to its future aspirations to be a leading center of ECE in Europe. An independent assessment report of the ECE department, which was conducted in January 2009 by distinguished professors from MIT, Technion, KTH and University of Illinois, states that “The faculty is highly qualified, carrying out first-class research, and would fit in first-rate academic institutions worldwide”. In the 2016 Times Higher Education 150 Under 50 Rankings, UCY is ranked 55 globally.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (FhG-IZM) develops and implements new concepts for the assembly of highly integrated electronic systems. Its application-oriented research bridges the gap between the microelectronic component providers and technical system manufacturers in a broad range of industrial sectors such as automotive, energy, safety and security, and medical. FhG-IZM, as a worldwide leader in electronic packaging technologies, has rapidly followed in the last decade the industrial trends towards completely integrated electronic systems and therefore has opened new R&D directions for integration at substrate level and wafer level. The traditional core competencies on chip interconnection technologies (wire bonding, flip chip bonding etc.), as well as substrate technologies for Multi-Chip Modules and reliability modeling and evaluation are further advanced and tailored to niche industrial electronic systems.

The Embedding & Substrates Group (ES Group) of the System Integration & Interconnection Technologies (SIIT) Department, which participates in the VISORSURF project, has very actively contributed in many EU related projects on embedding and System-in-Package technologies (Hiding Dies, Shift, TIPS, Hermes, WearBAN, WiserBAN, EmPower) as well as in German (MANOS, Hi-Level, Powerboard etc.) and international industrial projects. The exploitation outcome for IZM has been very remarkable with technology transfer of embedding technologies in large power semiconductor industries and patent licensing in medium and large size PCB companies.

SignalGeneriX is a leading high-tech Cypriot Research and Development (R&D) company operating in the fields of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Communications. The company is based in Cyprus but operates as expert provider of DSP technologies realized both in hardware and software to a wide network of clients and collaborators throughout Europe.
The company’s diversified portfolio of commercial products and intellectual property has been creatively used to develop beyond the state-of-the-art solutions for a wide range of industries ranging from Communications and Smart Systems to Offshore technologies, Security and Defense. SignalGeneriX’s track record for successful electronic product development is evident from more than fifteen internationally marketed products that use the company’s proprietary technologies.

SignalGeneriX received the EUREKA-label as recognition of substantial innovation in R&D and has recently been awarded the prestigious Cyprus Innovation Award 2013. The company’s performance has also been highlighted by the European Research Rankings where SignalGeneriX is ranked as the top research performing company in Cyprus. SignalGeneriX’s work has been presented in international industrial exhibitions and scientific conferences, published in acknowledged scientific journals and featured in science & technology news such as the Euronews Futuris documentary.

UPC (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research, with approximately 30.000 students, specialized in the fields of engineering, architecture and science. The UPC puts its scientific and technological infrastructure at the service of research groups and centers, researchers and students, professionals, companies and institutions. In a highly creative context, the UPC's research, teaching and management projects are based on the principles of freedom, justice, democracy, solidarity, cooperation, sustainability, efficiency, transparency and social responsibility. With a focus on intellectual rigor, critical thinking, a transversal approach to knowledge, educational innovation and entrepreneurship, the UPC produces competent professionals with the skills they need to tackle present and future challenges.

The activity that goes on at UPC campuses and schools has made the University a benchmark institution. The University harnesses the potential of basic and applied research, and transfers technology and knowledge to society. These actions make the UPC—in partnership with the productive fabric—an agent and driver of economic and social change.

The participation of the UPC in VISORSURF will be carried out by N3Cat (www.n3cat.upc.edu) researchers. The N3Cat center was founded in 2009 and has pioneered the field of graphene antennas for miniaturized wireless communications. The properties of graphene plasmonic RF antennas have been thoroughly investigated by N3Cat as functions of different technological and design parameters. The group has also devoted significant research efforts in establishing the communication foundations of graphene wireless communication and pioneered the off-chip and on-chip applications. This includes time-domain graphene an-tenna design and channel modelling, as well as development of modulations uniquely suited to this scenario.

Established in 2010, the Aalto University is a new university with centuries of experience. The Aalto University was created from the merger of three Finnish universities, and the new university's ambitious goal is to be one of the leading institutions in the world in terms of research and education in its own specialized disciplines. The research team lead by Prof. Sergei Tretyakov belongs to the National Centre of Excellence in Research SMARAD (2002-2007, 2008-2013), Department of Radio Science and Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering. The department carries out research and provides undergraduate and postgraduate education in microwave and millimetre wave measurement, antennas, radio wave propagation, advanced artificial materials, electromagnetics, circuit theory, and space technology. The research team has unique expertise on electromagnetic theory (especially the theory of composite electromagnetic materials, including metamaterials and metasurfaces), analytical modelling and design, electromagnetic computations, and microwave and terahertz-frequency measurements. The key personnel of this team are internationally well known as worldwide recognized experts in electromagnetics of metamaterials and metasurfaces. In particular, the core concept of software-defined metaterials, to be explored in this project, was introduced by prof. Tretyakov within the activities of the FP6 NoE Metamorphose. He also pioneered the concept of broadband meta-atoms with active elements.