Partners

The Airborne Technology Centre is part of the Airborne group. Airborne specialises in the design and manufacturing of advanced composite structures. It has facilities in The Netherlands (Den Haag) and in Spain (Girona) In total the company has around 120 employees of which about 20% engineers with a university background. Airborne is active in markets such as aerospace, marine, energy, defence and science. The business unit Airborne Composites four main lines of business: aeronautical structures, space components, antenna structures and high performance machine components. The business unit Airborne Composite Tubulars manufactures thermoplastic composite tubular for the Oil & Gas industry, with a proprietary in-house developed fully automated continuous production process.
The Airborne Technology Centre is founded with the mission to develop the new, differentiating composite technologies for Airborne.

FBGS Technologies is a privately held company founded in 2005. The company mission is being one of the industry leaders in manufacturing of highly reliable draw tower Fiber Bragg Grating sensors. It can rest on a technological background of the IPHT-Jena (Institute of Photonic Technology) which has more than 10 years experience on the level of FBG sensors. FBGS Technologies employs highly skilled personnel and masters an innovative highly automated production process which allows writing Fiber Bragg Gratings during the drawing of the fiber (Draw Tower Gratings, DTG®). This enables production of single FBGs but also high reliable and complex FBG chains at a much lower cost. The technology is being leveraged to produce FBG sensors with extremely high mechanical strength and high temperature resistance and delivers advanced functionality addressing innovative sensing applications. FBGS-technologies delivers sensors worldwide for a wide variety of application areas like research institutes, aerospace, wind energy, civil engineering, oil & gas industry, medical industry and automotive industry.
The strength of FBGS-technologies is partly based on the strong partnership with IPHT-Jena and the company FOS&S which is specialised in developing and implementing fiber optic sensors and sensing systems.
FBGS-technologies is also involved in a number of German research projects together with IPHT-Jena where they collaborate with partners such as Schott Jenaer Glas GmbH, Jenoptik LOS GmbH, Institut für Optik und Feinmechanik der Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (IOF) and the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena (FSU).

Founded in 1985, Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen located in Erlangen, Germany, ranks first among the Fraunhofer Institutes concerning headcount and revenues. Fraunhofer IIS is recognized for its research programs into microelectronics, information technology, telecommunications, audio and multimedia technology, digital radio, digital cinema, RF technology, satellite navigation, medical engineering, logistics, and mechanical and industrial automation. The researchers develop wireless communication systems, particularly digital broadcasting systems, as prototypes ready to go into commercial production. Technological ground and pillar are the audio and video coding schemes and their adoption as international standards. With the development of the audio coding method MPEG2 Layer-3, short MP3, Fraunhofer IIS has reached a worldwide recognition. As an independent R&D-Partner for RF-technologies including wireless communication technologies the Fraunhofer IIS wants to improve its technologies in this project. The wireless communication work of the development will be carried out mainly from the RF department. 45 researchers and 55 students work in different projects around RF. If it’s necessary researchers from other departments can work in cooperation (digital and analogue IC-Design, Communications, Medical technology, communication networks, and technologies for logistic services).

The Mechanics of Materials and Structures (MMS) research group has a long-term track record in the study of the mechanics of composite materials and other non-homogeneous materials. The mechanical behavior of materials is studied under static and dynamic loading conditions, where dynamic loading ranges from (high)dynamic impact over vibrations till fatigue.
For investigating these loading regimes, the group has a wide range of experimental facilities. Additionally, the experimental tests are equipped with a variety of non-destructive techniques. Research is running on the use of optical fiber sensors, ultrasound, digital moiré techniques and digital image correlation. Further, the group has a strong tradition in numerical modelling, in particular in finite element codes. Validation is done through comparison with instrumented experimental tests. For the moment, nearly 20 PhD students are active in the group.

Imec, which will handle the project management for SMARTFIBER, was founded in 1984 by the Flemish Government. It stands out as the largest independent European research centre in the field of microelectronics, nanotechnology, enabling design methods and technologies for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems. Today, IMEC has a staff of more than 1200 people, including 350 guest researchers and industrial residents. Its more than 120 million EUR revenue is derived from agreements and contracts with the Flemish government, the EC, EUREKA, the European Space Agency,
equipment and material suppliers and semiconductor companies world-wide. IMEC performs scientific research that runs 3 to 10 years ahead of industrial needs. Its balance between basic and application oriented research and its IPR policy form an attractive base for world-wide industrial collaborations.
IMEC-INTEC and Photonics Research Group
IMEC-INTEC is an associated laboratory of IMEC, located at Ghent University and consist of about 200 people. The photonics research group (about 50 people) of INTEC is headed by Prof. R. Baets and has been active in optoelectronics and photonics devices for many years. The main applications under study are silicon nanophotonics, heterogeneous integration, optical interconnect within advanced electronic systems,
WDM optical communication, silicon photonics biosensors an biomedical applications. More in particular, the silicon nanophotonics work focuses on the design and fabrication of SOI-based photonic crystal structures, photonic wires and fiber-coupling structures using standard lithographic techniques compatible with CMOS-processing. The group is also strongly involved in the development of heterogeneous
technologies, whereby the silicon photonics platform is combined with other materials such as III-V semiconductors for efficient sources, nanocrystals and polymers. The photonics research group was coordinating the network of excellence ePIXnet, which has more than 30 partners and focuses on photonic integrated circuits. The group has also been the prime contractor for numerous other IST-projects, including the FP6 project PICMOS and the FP5 projects IO, ISOLASER and NEWTON.

Optocap Ltd provides contract package design and assembly services for microelectronic and optoelectronic devices.
Optocap’s turn-key packaging services enable our customers to reduce development and manufacturing costs, accelerate time to market and reduce risk with new product developments.
Our expertise in packaging solutions spans the full product life-cycle: from design through prototyping, process optimisation, product qualification, failure analysis, volume manufacturing and transfer to low-cost volume manufacture. This provides customers adopting an outsourced manufacturing model with a much simplified and efficient supply chain.
In addition Optocap has extensive packaging knowledge for a number of applications and technologies: wafer saw, ball and wedge wire bonding, Au stud bumping, die bonding/die attach (epoxy and solder), flip chip assembly, precision epoxy dispense and daub, RF module packaging, System-in-Package (SiP), Multi-Chip Module packaging,
Laser diode packaging, HB-LED packaging, Photovoltaic Packaging, Optoelectronic Packaging/Fiber Coupling, MEMS and Sensor Packaging.
Optocap is a “Pure-Play” contract assembly service provider which means that we don’t manufacturer or market our own product lines and hence don’t compete with our customers. This is important for many customers concerned about IP leakage.

XenICs was founded in 2000 as a spinoff from IMEC in Leuven and in 2008 it already had revenue of approximately 7.5 Million Euro and a head count of 50 persons. The company is producing detector arrays and cameras for imaging applications with an increasing level of technology incorporated into the products.
Its customer base consists of diverse companies involved in a wide variety of markets, ranging from low light level inspection application to high speed application and active illumination applications. XenICs’ camera range covers the optical spectrum from visible light to the far infrared.
Most of XenICs’ products have initially been developed within research programs and commercialized versions have been made available 2-3 years after the end of the programs. As a recent example, the April 2007 launched EgyptSat, which can be tracked at