“From Nanoscience through Engineering to Innovation at Tyndall National Institute”
Speaker: Professor Roger W. Whatmore, CEO, Tyndall National Institute
Date: 18 July 2011
Time: 2pm
Venue: Building 53, room 4025B
Abstract:
Tyndall National Institute (Tyndall) is Ireland’s leading research centre in the field of ICT hardware, with over 400 staff, students and support personnel. It has a clear role to provide Irish academic and industrial researchers with an internationally-leading range of facilities and capabilities and to assist the movement of knowledge from fundamental research into industrial development. Its mission is as follows:
“Tyndall will be a Centre of Excellence for research, development and graduate training in Information and Communications Technology, recognised internationally for the quality of its outputs in materials, devices, systems and people, and its creation of new opportunities for Ireland’s economic growth.”
Tyndall’s research is focused on three strongly inter-related technical areas, identified as critical for Ireland in the future, vis: Micro/nanoelectronics, Photonics and Microsystems, including convergent work at the Life Science Interface. These are supported by strong activities in theory, modelling and design in all three research themes, and a high quality Central Fabrication Facility (CFF) for silicon and III-V semiconductor materials and devices. Tyndall has an excellent record of spinout generation (having been responsible for generating companies such as Firecomms, Farran, SensL and Biosensia) and the licensing of technologies to industry (such as its RadFET technologies - now used for the monitoring of radiation cancer therapy). It is also working closely with the whole of the Irish third level sector through the National Access Programme.
Research Institutes are set-up by governments for a variety of reasons, but generally politicians will at some point come back to the issue of how their investment is paying-back into the economy through the generation of economic activity. The mechanisms for how this can be fostered will be discussed in the light of Tyndall’s experiences and with reference to the three technical areas described above. In particular, the application of nanoscience into nanotechnology - exploitating the properties of matter and device structures at very fine scales - typically less than 100nm, is driving some very interesting and innovative developments. Examples which will be discussed include an innovative methods for making semiconductor devices at the nanoscale and an innovative transistor structure, which has eliminated the need for pn-junctions, new ideas in ferroelectric and multi-ferroic materials and new developments in III-V materials which could bear fruit in bringing high density storage and gigabit/s bandwidths to the consumer.
Biography:
Professor Roger Whatmore is a Cambridge graduate with eighteen years experience in the electronics industry with Plessey and GEC Marconi in the UK, followed by 11 years as Professor of Engineering Nanotechnology at Cranfield University in the UK. He led the team which won the Prince of Wales Award for Innovation in 1993, and was awarded GEC’s Nelson Gold Medal for his work in 1993 and the Griffith Medal and Prize for distinguished work in materials science from the IoM3 in 2003. He has published ca 300 papers (h=35) in the area of ferroelectric materials and their applications. He was a founder Director in 1996 of the company IRISYS, which specialises in IR sensing systems and now employs ca 100 people. He is now CEO of Tyndall National Institute, which is Ireland’s leading ICT research centre, with over 450 staff, students and industrial visitors. It has a clear role to provide Irish academic and industrial researchers with an internationally-leading range of facilities and capabilities and to assist the movement of knowledge from fundamental research into industrial development. He is currently serving as a member of the Forfas Advisory Science Council and is on the Boards of the CSETs CLARITY and CTVR. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.