TEMMT

A LNE Joint Research Project

The project

The rollout of 5G networks and the large-scale deployment of cellular IoT will lead to fundamental changes to our society, impacting not only consumer services but also industries embarking on digital transformations. CAVs are progressing rapidly and are expected to significantly improve traffic flow, safety and convenience. Space deployed radiometers are also used for passive remote sensing of atmospheric constituents which are related to climate change and play a critical role in environmental protection. All these applications require the use of the millimetre-wave and THz regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and demand devices and integrated circuits operating at these high frequencies.

However, the development of devices and systems to underpin these applications is currently hampered by the lack of traceability for electrical measurements at millimetre-wave and THz frequencies. For example, although power meters that work at frequencies up to at least 750 GHz are already commercially available, there is no established calibration hierarchy, accessible to industrial and other end-users, to allow traceability to the SI for these measurements. This is important to ensure product quality and end user confidence, and ultimately to improve the competiveness of European Industry. The work in this project also aligns with broader European visions, as outlined in the Europe Commission Strategy i.e. “Digital Single Market”.

The overall objective of this project is to achieve traceable and accurate measurement and characterisation of (i) S-parameters, (ii) power and (iii) materials properties (i.e. complex permittivity), at millimetre-wave and THz frequencies, for telecommunications and electronics technologies.

This EURAMET joint research project is receiving funding from the Horizon 2020 European Union Funding for Research & Innovation under the European Metrology Programme for Innovation and Research (EMPIR).

EMPIR  is the main funding programme for European research on metrology. It coordinates research projects to address grand challenges, while supporting and developing the SI system of measurement units.

This project is running from May 2019 to July 2022. It involves 16 European organisations and 3 international organisations:

 

The nine National Metrology Institutes:

  • CMI, Czech Republic
  • GUM, Poland,
  • INTI, Argentina
  • LNE, France
  • METAS, Switzerland
  • NPL, UK
  • PTB, Germany
  • TUBITAK, Turkey
  • VSL, Netherlands

The five industrial companies:

  • Anritsu, UK
  • FormFactor, Germany
  • Keysight, Belgium
  • Rohde & Schwarz (R&S), Germany
  • Virginia Diodes Inc (VDI), USA

The five universities/research institutes:

  • Forschungsverbund Berlin (FBH), Germany
  • The University of Birmingham (BHAM), UK
  • Chalmers university of technology (Chalmers), Sweden
  • University of Lille (ULILLE), France
  • Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna im Jaroslawa Dabrowskiego (WAT), Poland