News Article
A successful 2006 reported across the board
During a general meeting of Imec's Board of directors it was confirmed that 2006 was an all round excellent year for Europe's independant research company.
During a general meeting of Imec's Board of Directors it was confirmed that 2006 was an all round excellent year for the company. Imec was able to maintain its position as one of the primary nanoelectronics research institutes in Europe, an achievement made credible by IMEC's ability to adapt to the changing semiconductor landscape in response to industry needs.
The annual report credited the hard work, skills, and devotion of the IMEC researchers with creating many great results. This is documented by the increased level of material being published by quality journals and is often in collaboration with universities in Flanders and abroad. A large number of these papers were presented at renowned conferences in 2006 such as ISSCC, VLSI, and DATE, to mention but a few.
The number of invited papers and lectures saw a significant increase and 51 patents out of 97 submitted were granted last year.
To achieve these important results, IMEC had the support of 1489 industry co-workers representing a growth of 6.2% from 2005. Of this total figure 22% of these were guest researchers and delegates from the academic and industrial world.
From a financial perspective 2006 also delivered positive results. IMEC's total revenue was €227 million, of which €35.5 million consisted of the research grant from the Flanders Government. A major part of the total revenue was related to the successful implementation of the core partnership program on (sub-)32nm scaling, IMEC also welcomed Micron as its 9th core partner.
"Continuous interaction with the industry gives IMEC a clear view on pre-competitive research and changing semiconductor industry needs. IMEC has taken these changes as new opportunities;" said Gilbert Declerck, President and CEO of IMEC. "We increased the focus on memory technology, so that now both logic and memory (flash and DRAM) are investigated in our (sub-)32nm core program. With an increasing number of IDMs moving to a fablite model, we also extended our programs to answer the needs of all semiconductor players from IDMs, foundries to fablite companies. In 2006 we prepared an important reorganisation to maximize our multi-disciplinary research and in this way answered the increased demand for extra functionality in systems and chips. We also expected a lot from the bio-nano convergence where we explored an active collaboration with institutes that have expertise in the fields of medicine and molecular biology to complement our own expertise in micro and nanoelectronics engineering. Furthermore, Apollo, the successor of our multi-mode multimedia (M4) program was defined together with important industrial players."
The annual report credited the hard work, skills, and devotion of the IMEC researchers with creating many great results. This is documented by the increased level of material being published by quality journals and is often in collaboration with universities in Flanders and abroad. A large number of these papers were presented at renowned conferences in 2006 such as ISSCC, VLSI, and DATE, to mention but a few.
The number of invited papers and lectures saw a significant increase and 51 patents out of 97 submitted were granted last year.
To achieve these important results, IMEC had the support of 1489 industry co-workers representing a growth of 6.2% from 2005. Of this total figure 22% of these were guest researchers and delegates from the academic and industrial world.
From a financial perspective 2006 also delivered positive results. IMEC's total revenue was €227 million, of which €35.5 million consisted of the research grant from the Flanders Government. A major part of the total revenue was related to the successful implementation of the core partnership program on (sub-)32nm scaling, IMEC also welcomed Micron as its 9th core partner.
"Continuous interaction with the industry gives IMEC a clear view on pre-competitive research and changing semiconductor industry needs. IMEC has taken these changes as new opportunities;" said Gilbert Declerck, President and CEO of IMEC. "We increased the focus on memory technology, so that now both logic and memory (flash and DRAM) are investigated in our (sub-)32nm core program. With an increasing number of IDMs moving to a fablite model, we also extended our programs to answer the needs of all semiconductor players from IDMs, foundries to fablite companies. In 2006 we prepared an important reorganisation to maximize our multi-disciplinary research and in this way answered the increased demand for extra functionality in systems and chips. We also expected a lot from the bio-nano convergence where we explored an active collaboration with institutes that have expertise in the fields of medicine and molecular biology to complement our own expertise in micro and nanoelectronics engineering. Furthermore, Apollo, the successor of our multi-mode multimedia (M4) program was defined together with important industrial players."
