"Finland has a strong history of innovation and we were honored to have Antti Vasara, President and CEO of VTT, deliver a keynote at the MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit. Antti gave a captivating presentation on how VTT 's leading edge activities in sensing and imaging are driving innovations in big data, communication, autonomous driving and medical technologies. The research and innovations arising from Finland, and especially VTT, are enabling European growth in the electronics sector and strengthening Europe's global position as a leading technology region." Laith Altimime, President of SEMI Europe.
The annual summit for MEMS, Sensors and Imaging was held in Grenoble, France this last September. The event is organised by SEMI, the global industry association representing the electronics manufacturing supply chain. The event's programme always features key players of the semiconductor industry, ranging from research institutes and equipment manufacturers to large semiconductor foundries, as well as application and end user companies.
Strong presence
This year VTT's president and CEO Dr Antti Vasara gave a keynote presentation at the summit. Finnish companies such as Picosun, Okmetic, Beneq and Afore were attending. Okmetic won the technology showcase. EeNews and EeTimes both covered the event and Vasara's keynote.
"If anyone had doubts about Finland's ability to build on its radio heritage, they were dispelled in the keynote from Antti Vasara, president and CEO of VTT in Finland." Nitin Dahad, eetimes.com
Vasara presented a selected number of innovative technologies from VTT in the field of MEMS, sensors and imaging. These technologies enable new companies to be created and existing companies to differentiate and grow their business.
Addressing global challenges
Besides business opportunities, VTT's mandate and reason to be, the "why" of VTT, is to bring about solutions to global challenges. Vasara showed a video demonstrating this mandate. In a side interview with EeNews, he had an occasion to emphasize the organisation's focus on not only the carbon footprint, but on the carbon handprint and suggested this could be part of a common initiative with the research institutes dealing for example with the growing semiconductor business.
Vasara's keynote showed VTT's unique hyperspectral imaging technology. This innovation generates valuable information for several application areas. Examples include ultralight visible, near infrared and SWIR hyperspectral cameras on board of nanosatellites, skin cancer cameras, as well as environmental, agricultural and defence cameras. He further explained how VTT's terahertz imaging is applied for cost efficient security cameras by VTT's spinoff Asqella.
The unique RADAR technology from VTT has been applied in several areas. For example, it can help the visually impaired, or monitor sleep depth better than current commercial systems do. It can even measure emotions and vital signs from several people at the same time or monitor premature new-borns without being invasive.
VTT's ultrafast uncooled IR bolometers (sensors) enable imaging of fast moving targets or chemical reactions. The unique ultra-dense silicon photonics technology brings about new possibilities in data communication, solid state LIDAR, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), gas sensing, and much more. Vasara ended his talk by illustrating how arctic road conditions have to be included in the big picture of autonomous driving cars, and showed VTT's approach with data fusion and 5G communications.
Next event
VTT's CEO Antti Vasara and other VTT representatives will be present at Semicon Europa in Munich November 14th 2019 (TechARENA 1, Thursday, November 14 from 12:15 to 14:00). There will be speakers from Finland, who should further inspire the semiconductor industry about the Finnish edge and potential to co-create better solutions for industry and society at large. The covered topics will range from NewSpace opportunities, cryogenics for quantum computers (Bluefors), smart molded structures (Tactotek) to color X-RAY and gamma cameras (Advacam) and AI application use cases.
