During today’s General Assembly, the IMEC Board confirms that 2006 was an excellent year at all levels. IMEC was able to maintain its position as a leading nanoelectronics research institute and is constantly adapting to the changing semiconductor landscape to offer research programs the industry needs.

The hard work, skills, and devotion of the IMEC researchers resulted in many great results. Evidence of this is given by an 8.6% increase of the number of publications in prestigious journals and conference contributions to 1652, often achieved in collaboration with  universities in Flanders and abroad. A large number of these papers were presented at renowned conferences in 2006 (4 at ISSCC, 7 at VLSI, 11/7 at ESSDERC/ESSCIRC, 17 at IEDM, 7 at GLOBECOM, 13 at DATE, 19 at EPVSEC , 4 at IMAPS, 7 at ECOC...). The number of invited papers and lectures increased with 43% to 139 . Also, 97 patents were submitted and 51 patents were granted in 2006.

To achieve these important results, IMEC could count on 1489 coworkers which represents a growth of 6.2% as compared to 2005. 22% are guest researchers and residents from the academic and industrial world.

2006 was also positive from a financial side. IMEC’s total revenue (P&L) was 227 million Euro, of which 35,5 million Euro consists of the research grant from the Flanders Government. A major part of the total revenue is related to the successful implementation of the core partnership program on (sub-)32nm scaling. For example, in 2006 IMEC welcomed Micron as its 9th core partner.

"Continuous interaction with the industry gives IMEC a clear view on the pre-competitive research the changing semiconductor industry needs. IMEC has taken these changes as new opportunities;" said Gilbert Declerck, President and CEO of IMEC. "We increased the focus on memory technology, so that now both logic and memory (flash and DRAM) are investigated in our (sub-)32nm core program. With an increasing number of IDMs moving to a fablite model, we also extended our programs to answer the needs of all semiconductor players from IDMs, foundries to fablite companies. In 2006, we have prepared an important reorganization to maximize our multi-disciplinary research and in this way answering the increased demand for extra functionality in systems and chips. We also expect a lot from the bio-nano convergence where we explore an active collaboration with institutes that have expertise in the fields of medicine and molecular biology to complement our own expertise in micro- and nanoelectronics engineering. Furthermore, Apollo, the successor of our multi-mode multimedia (M4) program has been defined together with important industrial players."

For more information:

Katrien Marent
Corporate Communication Manager
IMEC, Kapeldreef 75
B- 3001 Leuven, Belgium
Tel +32 16 28 18 80 Fax +32 16 28 16 37
Email: Katrien.Marent@imec.be