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Quantimony Impact

QUANTIMONY was created as the first transnational coordinated action focused on the scientific and industrial challenges posed by III-Sb quantum technologies. Our first impact priority was to mitigate the current fragmentation of our community to solve present challenges and those of the future. This has been accomplished in two ways:

  • Firstly, by establishing large cohesion among its beneficiaries and partners. Thanks to the extensive ESR secondment program and the complementary skills and strengths available at the different network nodes, most of the research activities have been completed through the participation of at least two organizations, sometimes three or four.
  • Secondly, the network has been very effective in creating awareness about the quantum antimonides research field and in promoting new collaborations beyond the consortium. In the last three years, the network has organized 17 training activities distributed in 12 different events. Researchers and collaborators from 51 different external organizations have attended these meetings, either as participants or invited speakers

Beyond the state of the art, QUANTIMONY has delivered a range of long term potential technological and societal benefits that will sustainably improve quality of life for the European citizen, contributing to a Europe more connected, healthier, securer, happier and environmentally sustainable.

  • A crucial scientific and engineering challenge of QUANTIMONY was to develop better and more scalable infrared sources and detectors for environmental and health monitoring applications. To this respect, the project results have paved the way to develop in the future new cavity enhanced mid-infrared detectors and to integrate both active components in photonic circuits for on-chip sensing applications.
  • Towards the challenge of developing new Nonvolatile Random Access Memory Technology, since the preparation of the QUANTIMONY proposal impressive advances were made in the III-Sb memories developed in University of Lancaster, known as ULTRARAM™. QUANTIMONY have strengthened the collaboration and joint activities towards the industrialization of these new universal computer memories based on III-Sb. This patented technology developed by ULANC partly during the project aims to take a stake of the $100 billion per year memory chip industry.
  • Towards the Quantum Communication Technologies challenge, the research carried out on III-Sb quantum dots has led to new collaborations and activities in the field of single photon sources (SPS) development including GaSb/AlGaSb quantum dots with type I confinement and emission in telecom wavelengths which was not foreseen in the proposal.
  • The research done to find the optimal epitaxial growth conditions and to transfer them to industrial epitaxy reactors will play a crucial role in the scalability of any semiconductor technology in general and of those based on antimony materials in particular. The expanded knowledge on the process conditions, and the simulation of said process conditions in industrial reactors done during QUANTIMONY, will enable to straightforwardly develop products when the market requires them.
  • Finally, our understanding of the intriguing electronic, optical and magnetic properties of III-Sb semiconductors has largely expanded. New software tools for multiband k.p and atomistic methods have been developed and deployed within the network to improve the characteristics of different III-Sb materials and devices, including single photon emitters, solar cells, Interband Cascade Lasers (ICL), Interband Cascade Detectors and type-II superlattices (T2SLs). Many of these new tools become now part of commercial products of our industrial software developing companies and include evolutionary methods done in QUANTIMONY which will leverage on the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), opening completely new perspectives in the future.

Fully aligned with the Chips Act, where the EU aims to double its global market share in semiconductors from 10% to at least 20% by 2030 in order to ensure the EU’s future technological sovereignty, QUANTIMONY, had, on the first place, benefited the industrial organisations that deploy this plan with improved access to the scientific community, which will positively impact their ability to recruit skilled personnel, facilitate the communication of key market demands and technological challenges, and allow them to be better informed of the potential of III-Sb quantum materials and devices. And, secondly, by developing the skills of 14 ESRs, we have responded to the increasing demand of skilled professionals in this specific field needed by the same semiconductor industries.

Led by our Exploitation and Industrial Engagement Committee (EIEC), we have made great progress towards creating impact with the exploitation of the just presented QUANTIMONY’s results. As revealed in our exploitation plans, QUANTIMONY has established a path for further exploitation of III-Sb semiconductors identifying new Key Exploitable Results, and refining them with the aid of the Horizon Results Booster initiative. Some of them need of further academic and industrial research and, to this end, beneficiaries and partners have raised ~4.8 M€ in new bids to international (820 k€) and national calls (3.98 M€). Other results are mature enough to start addressing different markets and we estimate that these new business opportunities, assuming a 10 % annual market increase, lead to a total estimated revenue by 2030 of >7 M€.

Also, a Communication and Dissemination Plan (D7.2) has been implemented since month 12 of the project, with the monitorisation of the Dissemination and Public Engagement Committee (DPEC) and the Network Coordination Office (NCO). QUANTIMONY’s scientific results have been communicated and disseminated in 61 scientific, industry and hybrid events, and 27 open access scientific publications, so far including 21 journal articles and 6 conference proceedings which acknowledge the Action. Public engagement is reflected in the organization and participation in more than 120 outreach activities. We estimate that, in the context of all dissemination and communication activities, we have reached more than 30 k EU citizens among, scientists, industry professionals and general public and also raised the interest on our project results among many investors, customers and policy makers.

Resulting from these efforts, QUANTIMONY project’s results will arrive to the European Semiconductor Industry within 5 years to remain competitive in transforming effective and efficient materials and architectures, designs and integration technologies into deployable products at the beginning of the semiconductor value chain. In 10 years, III-Sb technologies, like new computer memory devices developed in this project are understood as key for several downstream semiconductor industries, as well as for the creation of new SMEs linked to the development of emerging Quantum Computing and Networking Technologies.