MIRELAI
MIRELAI is an EU-funded Industrial Doctoral Network with the ambition to address the challenges reliability, sustainability, and verification efforts related to microelectronics, and boost Europe’s innovation capacity and competitiveness in the market. To achieve this goal, the programme trains the next generation of engineers and scientists for the next generation of reliable and repairable microelectronics developed within a trustworthy European value chain.
Project Partners
- Polymer Competence Center Leoben (PCCL) - Coordinator
- Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI)
- Technische Universität Chemnitz (TU Chemnitz)
- Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)
- VZW Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum (IMEC)
- ams AG (ams OSRAM)
- AT & S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik AG
- Robert Bosch GmbH (Bosch)
- Berliner Nanotest und Design GmbH (Nanotest)
- Nexperia BV (Nexperia)
- NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NXP)
- Siemens Industry Software NV (SISW)
- Technoprobe S.p.A. (Technoprobe)
Associated Partners
- University of Greenwich (UOG)
- Materials Consultancy Services Ltd. (MCS)
- accelopment Schweiz AG (accelCH)
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven)
- Montanuniversität Leoben (MUL)
- Signify N.V. (signify)
- Material Center Leoben (MCL)
Motivation and Goals
The European microelectronics industry faces numerous barriers in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape. One of the main challenges is to ensure the reliability and sustainability of the electronic components and systems to meet the proposed European Union's ‘Right to Repair’rules. The current European Parliament resolution calls for products that are designed in a way that they last longer and that they can be repaired. Another challenge is identified in product verification and testing, which take up 70% of total development time. This means that the success-critical time to market is not dominated by the actual technology development but by the product release process, representing a financial burden for the industry and reducing Europe’s competitive advantage over key global players.
Given the strategic importance of the microelectronics industry for the European economy, which in2021 has impacted roughly 20% of the European GDP and employed over 250.000 people, Europe must form the next generation of cross-discipline experts in electronic manufacturing and digital innovations to be able to compete with other global players, such as China and North America, and thus strengthening European technological sovereignty in such a critical field.
In response to this issue, officially kicked off in October 2022, the doctoral network MIRELAI – Microelectronics RELiability driven by Artificial Intelligence – is an innovative EU-funded project with the ambition to address the challenges related to the production of microelectronics, and boost Europe’s innovation capacity and competitiveness in the market. Bringing together a unique industry-academia partnership across 7 European countries, MIRELAI will combine expertise and capacity to train the next generation of engineers for reliable microelectronics, specifically electronic components and systems.
To achieve this goal, the project is recruiting 13 doctoral candidates (DCs) to investigate the physics of degradation and reduce testing and verification efforts in the microelectronic industry value chain. Additionally, DCs will be offered scientific and industry skills training to ensure that the knowledge produced with the project is brought into the market. The direct transfer of knowledge from academia to industry is a unique aspect of MIRELAI, which will contribute to speeding up Europe’s innovation capacity and boost competitiveness in the global Electronic Components and Systems (ESC) market.
Main Goals
The primary goal for MIRELAI is to train cross-discipline experts who will introduce a new level of efficiency into the development of innovative and reliable microelectronic systems within a European value chain.
To pursue this goal, the following scientific objectives have been defined:
- Identification of uncertainties of all analysed materials and processes applied within the research projects and summary of thefindings in a common database
- Description of the degradation development behaviour as input for the physics-informed learning (function or interrelation).
- -Time-efficient, accurate digital twins at component and assembly level running in real-time.
- PCBA feature criticality assessment based on parameterized models considering uncertainties.
- Trained and validated surrogate models to explore massive design spaces, identify multi-dimensional correlations and manage ill-posed problems.
- Prediction of the remaining useful lifetime (RUL) of electronic systems using machine learning.
Objectives and Approach
Microelectronics reliability is inherently a multi-disciplinary problem at multiple levels. The necessary main disciplines are engineering, electronics, machine learning, material physics, programming and numerical simulation. Besides the skills in these disciplines, it is necessary to understand the interrelations along the electronic system value chain. The reliability of electronic components depends on the global system behaviour (e.g., distribution of global mechanical and temperature loads), just as the system, in turn, depends on the functioning and performance of the individual components. Further, knowledge of the individual featured materials is essential to understand the underlying physics of degradation. Metals, polymers, composites or semiconductors have very specific properties and physical fundamentals. In addition, to master the increasingly complex challenges of developing and implementing new intelligent electronic systems, future researchers are required to build a strong network, share knowledge and work in teams. These challenges underline the unique position of MIRELAI. The project is a matchless opportunity to strengthen the cooperation between the world’s leading European institutes in the field of microelectronic reliability to link their respective in-depth knowledge regarding the individual system levels. The trained DCs will represent the starting point for a sustainable network of cross-disciplinary experts in Europe ready to shape the future of the European microelectronics industry.
“MIRELAI is a unique opportunity for young researchers to become cross-discipline experts leading the way to a sustainable microelectronics industry.”
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Funding Body
Funded by the European Union (Grant Agreement No. 101072491). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. Partners from the UK are supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
