Holst Centre

Breakthroughs with sensing in the human body

Holst Centre and others are working on body area networking to monitor vital signs, control drug delivery according to need and otherwise progress towards bionic man and woman and care of the disabled and elderly. Unfortunately cutting into your body to change batteries brings with it a significant percentage of mortalities, not just pain and infection. Energy harvesting within the body is potentially helpful but biobatteries and thermoelectric generators provide only weak amounts of electricity in such applications.

Imec and partners start work on EU project PRIMA

Imec announces that it has started work, together with its project partners, on PRIMA, a project under the EU's 7th framework program for ICT (FP7). The project's goal is to improve the efficiency and cost of solar cells though the use of metallic nanostructures.

Breakthroughs with sensing in the human body

Holst Centre and others are working on body area networking to monitor vital signs, control drug delivery according to need and otherwise progress towards bionic man and woman and care of the disabled and elderly. Unfortunately cutting into your body to change batteries brings with it a significant percentage of mortalities, not just pain and infection. Energy harvesting within the body is potentially helpful but biobatteries and thermoelectric generators provide only weak amounts of electricity in such applications.

Portable, easy-to-wear mind speller typing words with your brain

Imec, Holst Centre and the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven on the 23rd March presented the Mind Speller, a portable, easy-to-wear, intelligent textual and verbal communications prototype device enabling people with motoric disabilities (suffering from for example brain paralysis or speech or language disorders) to communicate.

The Holst Centre

The Holst Centre an R&D facility sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Government of Flanders is another step closer to fast roll to roll (R2R) manufacturing of flexible OLEDs, OPVs and Smart Packaging.

OE-A's 5th anniversary

With its 135 members all over the world, the OE-A has become a highly dynamic and constantly growing network of leading international companies and institutes in the past five years", said Wolfgang Mildner, Chairman of the OE-A and Managing Director, PolyIC GmbH & Co. KG, Germany, on the occasion of the 5th anniversary celebration of the OE-A - the industry association for organic and printed electronics - in late February at the Holst Centre in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In December 2004, 35 members founded this working group within VDMA. "One of the founding principles of the OE-A five years ago was the goal to build an international industry association to jointly develop this future multi-billion Euro market", emphasized the Chairman of the OE-A. "Cooperation all along the value chain is essential in this phase; no company can achieve it alone."

Introduction of Coatema's new Minicoater at Printed Electronics Europe

Printed Electronics Europe 2010 is one of the World's largest events on printed and organic electronics. Coatema Coating Machinery, one of the pioneers in these fields with installations at VTT, Holst Centre, IPMS Dresden, IAP Potsdam and several other leading R&D institutions worldwide is going to present a new development for small-scale, cost-efficient and multifunctional R&D roll to roll equipment.

Imec, Holst Centre present ADC suited for low energy radios

At yesterday's International Solid State Circuit Conference, Imec and Holst Centre reported an ultra-low power 8 bit analog to digital convertor (ADC) consuming only 30fJ energy per conversion step.

Record performance of dual-gate organic TFT-based RFID circuit

At yesterday's International Solid State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), Holst Centre, Imec and TNO presented a dual-gate-based organic RFID chip with record data rate and lowest reported operating voltage.

Imec and Holst Centre achieve breakthrough in battery-less radios

At yesterday's International Solid State Circuit Conference, imec and Holst Centre reported a 2.4GHz/915MHz wake-up receiver which consumes only 51µW power.

Imec and Holst Centre at International Solid State Circuit Conference

At this week's International Solid State Circuit Conference, Imec and Holst Centre present their newest breakthroughs in ultra-low power design for wireless communications and wireless sensor networks, 3D design and inorganic electronics with an impressive number of contributions including 10 reviewed publications and 6 contributions to tutorials and workshops.

Imec, Holst Centre on ultra-low power heart activity signal processor

At yesterday's International Solid State Circuit Conference, imec and Holst Centre report an analog-signal processor ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) - in short ASP - that reduces the overall power consumption of an ambulatory heart activity signal monitoring systems by more than 5 times.

Major step towards low-power all-optical switching

The January issue of the premier scientific magazine Nature Photonics publishes an ultra-small and fast, electrically pumped all-optical memory on a silicon chip with record low power consumption.

IMEC joins consortium to radically reduce energy consumption

Today, imec announces that it will take part in the Green Touch Initiative, a new consortium initiated by Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. The Green Touch Initiative is committed to inventing the technologies that will be at the heart of the next generation of sustainable networks.

Holst Centre, imec and TNO report a world-first plastic transponder

Today, at the International Electronics Devices Meeting, Holst Centre, imec and TNO presented the world-first organic transponder circuit with a bit rate of 50kbits/s. This bit rate approaches the requirements for the Electronic Product Coding (EPC) standards.

Micromachined piezoelectric harvester with record power output

For the first time, a piezoelectric harvesting device fabricated by MEMS technology generates a record of 85μW electrical power from vibrations. A wafer level packaging method was developed for robustness.

Terepac partnership on low-cost flexible electronics packaging

Terepac Corporation and IMEC announced their collaboration on novel packaging technologies for flexible electronics.

ECG necklace for home cardiac monitoring

An ECG necklace that monitors long-term cardiac performance allows patients to remain mobile to continue their daily activities while under observation using an embedded beat detection algorithm monitoring system.

Body area networking standard attracts industry attention

The recent IEEE 802.15.6 Working Group meeting in Montreal, Canada drew significant interest from major industry players including Philips, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Toumaz and Samsung.

Energy harvesting at Holst Research Centre part two

In the power generation work for microsystems at Holst Research Centre, in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, the main focus is on 'harvesting' unused ambient energy such as body heat and stray light.