The Responsible Electronics project Portfolio: Creative Approaches for Sustainable Innovations in the Electronics Industry
The European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Pathfinder Challenges programme supports a cohesive collection of projects within specific thematic areas, each working towards distinct objectives for their respective challenges. The overarching aim of this initiative is to foster innovative opportunities for discovering more sustainable electronic materials, thereby minimizing environmental impact and reducing reliance on critical raw materials. Each project within the Portfolio is dedicated to paving the way for a more sustainable electronics industry, bringing together unique consortia and employing creative approaches.
STELEC is a part of the Responsible Electronics portfolio, which encompasses nine projects in total:
DESIRE4EU
The project develops sustainable, circular printed circuit boards (PCBs) in Europe using bio-based materials. DESIRE4EU envisions assembling bio-based multilayer PCBs and creating guidelines for sustainable electronics solutions. Additionally, it aims to develop a cost-effective, advanced proof of concept that engages students, citizens, and industries.
ELEGANCE
ELEGANCE develops a new, printable, and light-operated processing technology specialised for IoT edge computing applications. The project employs abundant and recyclable eco-friendly materials. The processor enables simultaneous IoT energy-efficient computing and visual sensing. The project will implement in-memory computing schemes, such as crossbar memristor arrays, by employing low-cost, industrially compatible sustainable printing techniques.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elegance-eu-project
GREENoMORPH
The project aims to reduce the environmental impact of electronics by addressing manufacturing, usage, and disposal and eliminating the need for critical raw materials in electronic devices. It uses neuromorphic computing instead of traditional Von Neumann computing, drastically reducing energy consumption during use. It will use organic electronics with eco-friendly materials and employ low-temperature additive manufacturing techniques for all organic artificial sensory neuron components designed to recognise tactile pressure patterns.
GRETA
GRETA will lay the foundation of the first green, printed and flexible organic wireless identification tag operating at Ultra-High Frequency (UHF, 300 MHz – 1 GHz). The long-term vision of the project is to enable remote powering and readout of tags up to meters of distance, as required in logistics and security, without the need for a battery and drastically reducing lifecycle impact and cost in comparison to any available passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
HaloFreeEtch
HaloFreeEtch aims to identify new, halogen-free and sustainable etching processes for sustainable semiconductor manufacturing, applied to deep etching of silicon and silicon oxide. The project will provide a novel model and data-based methodology for sustainability and life cycle analysis of plasma-etching to quantify the carbon-footprint of all novel etching processes. HaloFreeEtch combines lab-scale research on three innovative technological routes with computational screening of novel and promising etchants, a comprehensive multi-scale modeling approach to predict potential working points and a model-based life cycle and sustainability analysis.
HISOPE
HiSOPE focuses on novel, fast and broadband organic optoelectronic materials, devices and systems, allowing high added-value applications such as optical data transmission and wireless optical communication. The project aims to develop organic semiconductor (OSC) materials and fabricate different organic devices like High-Speed Organic Light Emitting Diodes, High-Speed Organic PhotoDetectors, and electrically driven Short Pulse Organic Lasers, and integrate these into lab-scale waveguided and wireless data transmission demonstrators.
RADIANT
This project aims to relieve the environmental burden of LED technology while also improving its competitiveness. RADIANT incorporates the property of chirality into three emerging LED technologies: organic, perovskite, and quantum dot-based, significantly enhancing LED performance and reducing production costs.
SUPERLASER
The project aims to develop low-cost, ultranarrow linewidth halide perovskite lasers. SUPERLASER aims to design halide perovskites as topological lasers without additional cavities, fabricate the first room-temperature, electrically pumped perovskite lasers, and ensure zero e-waste through recycling and reuse protocols.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/superlaser-eic-pathfinder
