Companies / Markets

First Solar to accelerate American thin film PV innovation with $270M investment

Wednesday 02 November 2022
Companies / Markets

First Solar, Inc. (Tempe, Arizona) plans to invest approximately $270M in a dedicated research and development (R&D) innovation centre in Perrysburg, Ohio. The new facility is believed to be the first of its scale in the United States and is expected to accelerate American leadership in the development and production of advanced thin film photovoltaics (PV).

Canatu raises €18M capital for growth

Tuesday 01 November 2022
Companies / Markets

Canatu (Vantaa, Finland), a leader in advanced CNT for automotive and semiconductor industries, announced the closing of a €18M funding round, led by long-standing investors 3M Ventures, the venture capital arm of 3M, Ascend and eFruit International Inc. New investors to Canatu also included Minth Group Ltd., Nordea, and Varma. With this latest funding round, the company has raised a total of €74M in financing since 2008.

Avery Dennison’s atma.io joins CIRPASS to lay the ground for deployment of European digital product passports

Monday 31 October 2022
Companies / Markets

Avery Dennison’s (Mentor, Ohio) atma.io connected product cloud joins the CIRPASS consortium, bringing together a core network of leading organisations in building the European vision for a unified Digital Product Passport (DPP) approach across multiple value chains. Funded by the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme, CIRPASS aims to prepare the ground for the gradual piloting and deployment of the DPPs from 2023 onwards, with an initial focus on the electronics, batteries and textile sectors.

PragmatIC Semiconductor leads project to develop sustainable manufacturing technologies

Wednesday 26 October 2022
Companies / Markets

PragmatIC Semiconductor (Cambridge, UK), a world leader in flexible electronics, is leading a £2.4 million project with funding provided by the Made Smarter Innovation: Smart Sustainable Factory Challenge at UK Research and Innovation. The INSPIRE project will develop and deploy new digital technologies within PragmatIC’s FlexLogIC semiconductor fabrication facilities, to drive improved resource efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing operations.

Imec demonstrates flat-panel-display-compatible pMUT technology for emerging ultrasound applications

Monday 17 October 2022
Companies / Markets

At the 2022 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, imec (Leuven, Belgium), a world-leading research and innovation centre in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, presented a piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasound Transducer (pMUT) array that is compatible with flat-panel-displays (FPD) process technologies. The array demonstrates acoustic pressures in mid-air above 1kPa, a pressure level relevant for enabling mid-air haptics and directed sound. Moving from wafer-based to FPD-compatible processes prepares the pMUT technology for the integration of future mid-air applications, such as vibro-haptics, time-of-flight (3D) sensing or gesture recognition, in novel form factors like smartphones and car dashboards. This technology can be used to create touchless, interactive, screens in automotive and consumer applications, or used in gaming.