Research

In 2020 the CMOS technology as basis of microelectronics will reach its technical and physical limit. Today, scientists already think about new technologies for the future.

One promising approach for overcoming the limitation is to place the microelectronics and the microsystem technology on a totally new foundation of materials beyond the silica based semiconductor technology. We deal with a special interesting class of materials – the intrinsic active polymers. These offer two special advantages: (a) They can be microstructured with very easy processes like pressure and lithographic processes and (b) because of their wide variety, they provide a high number of functional groups, which can not be realized with normal semiconductor materials.

The research of microsystems on the basis of intrinsic active polymers, internationally, is still in a very early stage, therefore our research focuses on the fundamentals. To use the properties of intrinsic active polymers we are moving away from the mainstream and are inventing the microsystem technology anew. We address the microfluidics, imaging systems, chemical sensors, chemical information processing and elastomeric actors.