Graphenea successfully closes the year 2019, looking back on many projects completed, new ones started, a continued streak of published research results and the launch of a new product.

We launched new projects together with our industrial and academic partners throughout Europe to satisfy technological and market needs across industries such as energy production, displays and imaging, gas sensing, and education. All projects lean on our core expertise on producing high quality graphene and graphene oxide.

Two new projects that are close to the market exploit the imaging capabilities of graphene. Project GIMOD is a short 12-month effort to make a prototype fast, low-power, high-resolution display based on the proven graphene interferometric modulator display technology, together with the start-up SCALE Nanotech. The second project, also funded by the European Commission, brings us together with Emberion Oy and AMO GmbH to produce short wave infrared detectors made of wafer-scale graphene (G-IMAGER). Such detectors have applications in semiconductor inspection, sorting systems, spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging and surveillance.

Also in 2019, together with a consortium of 12 partners from 7 different European countries, we started a project to improve the efficiency and cost of geothermal drilling. Our role is to develop new materials and coatings to improve drilling component resistance to abrasion, erosion, corrosion and impact, for drilling depth up to 5km and temperatures of at least 250 Celsius. Other consortium members will strive towards the same goals within their areas of expertise during the 42-month long project GeoDrill, with a projected reduction in drilling cost by 30-60% for this most underutilized of renewable energy sources.

We teamed up with other European partners to address the growing challenge of air pollution by developing low-cost and low-power optical gas sensors based on graphene. Optical gas sensors offer the highest sensitivity, stability and specificity on the market, however the cost, power consumption and size of state-of-the-art solutions hinder them from being widely employed by the general public. Our technology based on graphene and other 2D materials combined with 1D nanowire mid-IR emitters and mid‏-IR waveguide-based gas sensing aims to empower the general public to monitor and put demands on their air quality.

Graphenea is also active in education. Together with our partners on project METIS, we strive to tighten collaboration between the microelectronics industry and education providers. The project will focus on the skills and related training needed to support emerging verticals such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous driving and Industry 4.0.

The many projects that we participate in are often founded on fundamental research of our staff. To name a few, in 2019 we made advances in fundamental characterization of graphene and its interactions with substrates, sensing potassium ions in liquid and humidity in air, organic solar cells and mechanical reinforcement of alumina. Our research was published in leading international scientific journals.

Photo: GFET S-20 sensor chip

Finally, following an analysis of customer and research demands, near the end of the year we launched a new product: highly flat monolayer graphene on thin copper film. The product aims to meet wafer-scale integration requirements to build uniform graphene devices in a fashion compatible with current industrial fabrication methods. We also introduced a new design of our GFET sensing products, the GFET S-20, which is designed for measurements in a liquid medium.

We wish all our customers and visitors a happy and successful 2020. Keep following our blog where we will post the latest news as they occur!