The ETHICS project aims to develop new generations of piezoelectric transducers and MEMS based on the microfabrication of lead-free piezoelectric composites. This project addresses technological developments to make an ecological transition towards robust sensors and frequency sources for applications in health, non-destructive testing or extreme temperature conditions. ETHICS is a single-team multidisciplinary project for the integration of lead-free piezoelectrics, the validation of mirofabrication processes and test phases, finally the development of robust models for the integration of piezoelectric composites in their environment. ETHICS will make it possible to constitute a technological hub and a team of excellence to carry out academic and industrial research.

The FAST-LAB -- Certified And Secure Time and frequency transfer -- common laboratory project aims at promoting and shaping the interest of the FEMTO-ST institute and the company Gorgy Timing for developing secure and certified time dissemination systems. Time dissemination has become a requirement for current interactions in a society meeting increased timing pressure in its exchanges. Improving accuracy, traceability and safety has become mandatory for the time references clocking today's rail and air traffic, or in the context of distributed energy production in the context of smart grids. Similarly, we address secure timestamping financial transactions -- with Europe being the first institution to draft a law governing such activities with a time reference (MIFID2) -- as well as synchronizing distributed power generation and high bandwidth communication networks. In these 3 examples, the core information is ``time'' and, within the current deployment framework, security and tracking the timestamp information is only beginning. The broad range of time sources, including historical Very Low Frequency (VLF) sources which are currently neglected considering the ease of use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks, provides means of reducing jamming and spoofing risks. Safety of these critical timing services becomes a need that we address by securing the timestamp exchange (using cryptography and two way interactions between clocks exchanging messages). Making the best use of the sources of time and means of accessing these time representations are on the one hand addressed by combining multiple commercially available sources (GNSS, quartz oscillators) and on the other hand by developing dedicated systems meeting the unique requirements of redundancy (flexible software defined radio receivers able to adapt to jamming sources, composite sources dedicated to time transfer applications, time transfer over optical fibers such as White Rabbit). In this context, securing timestamp servers becomes a mandatory requirement, both against classical technical sources of technical failure and vulnerability as well as against attacks focusing on semantics of secure time data and their spoofing. Gorgy Timing is an innovative family SME, dedicated to time transfer. Providing solution for time dissemination, the company is a European leader by developing tools for secure, certified, precise and traceable UTC time diffusion on a network reaching the customer with an accuracy ranging from the millisecond to the nanosecond. In the framework of these innovations, the company Gorgy Timing wishes to enhance its research and development capabilities on secure time and frequency dissemination with the FEMTO-ST institute -- UMR6174. FEMTO-ST, through its Time and Frequency department, exhibits a long and internationally recognized expertise in characterizing and generating ultra-stable frequency signals. Digital signal processing techniques applied to radiofrequency (RF) signals, derived from software defined radio techniques, for characterizing time and spectral characteristics of oscillators provide the opportunity to bridge the fields of interests of the two partners. FEMTO-ST also provides expertise in the field of cybersecurity through the security test team of the Computer Science department (DISC), hence providing a synergy on the research topics ranging from time-frequency to software security.

Sensing and analyzing extremely low physical, chemical or biological quantities in situ, within hard-to-reach environments, are rapidly growing demands. Though among the best components in terms of compactness for addressing this challenge, “Lab-on fiber” concept suffers from limited sensitivity performances. On the other hand, all-fiber interferometric sensors have the potential to significantly enhance detection sensitivity. However, such probes suffer from an important phase noise in reaction to temperature of mechanical stress fluctuations, which strongly limit their applicability. CIFOM comes within this framework. It is aimed at realizing the first ultra-stable fibered interferometric sensors by combining the best of these two approaches. Transposition of interferometric sensor concepts to fibered devices is presently hindered by the high sensitivity of optical fibers to environmental disturbances (temperature and mechanical stress fluctuations). CIFOM will overcome all of these issues by implementing the first “common-path” interferometric probe within a multicore fiber. Thermal and mechanical issues in fibered phase-interrogation approaches will then be cancelled out. The probes will be incorporated within homodyne and heterodyne interferometers to reach record in-situ detection resolution, far exceeding state-of-the-art detection performances of fiber-integrated systems. The production of such disruptive fiber probes will be enabled by a novel key technology, namely the development of a monolithic core-to-core optical interconnect integrated at one end-face of a multicore fiber. The resulting fiber sensors will be demonstrated as ultrasensitive refractometers in the detection of hazardous volatile organic compounds diluted in air and in organic/aqueous solvents (concentration down to the ppm, or below). The integration of nano-optically driven interferometric approaches within optical fibers will lead to completely new versatility and unmatched performances in the extreme exploration of hard-to-reach physical or biological locations, thus impacting a wide panel of scientific, medical and industrial domains of high economic and societal perspectives. In that context, despite high scientific challenges, CIFOM is geared toward prototyping and the valorization of patentable outcomes. The ambition is here to bridge the gap between fundamental concepts and market-ready prototypes. Therefore, the key fundamental issues of CIFOM will be industrially addressed from the very outset of the project in order to achieve short term out-of-lab prototyping. Such an ambition required the creation of a highly multidisciplinary consortium combining an industrial company and three research teams of an academic Institute. The consortium behind this project is unique and will enable the development and validation of this new scientific and technological approach with ambitious and highly complementary objectives covering all the key disciplines and themes of the project. The related important technology challenges will be taken up thanks to the fabrication facilities of the whole consortium, involving one of the five technology platforms of the French “Renatech” network.

One of the main current challenges in nanosciences is the exploitation of single molecular machines for mechanical applications in the real world. In the proposed project, molecular design, chemical synthesis, theory and STM experiments will be combined to investigate the mechanical properties of single molecular rotors and motors for which we can trigger and control a unidirectional rotation. We will first design and synthesize prototypes of nanowinch integrating our motor capable of towing a large panel of "nanoloads" on a surface. Covering a broad range of loads will allow us to determine the effective mechanical work delivered by this molecular motor. If validated, this strategy could be generalized to test other electrically-addressed molecular motors. In a second part, we will develop original strategies to explore the use of double-decker coordination complexes and polyaromatic hydrocarbons with star-shaped geometries as molecular gears. These studies will be performed on metallic surfaces at very low temperature and on semi-conducting surfaces at room temperature. The transfer of a rotation movement in a train of gears, as well as the laws governing the mechanics of such movements, will be studied.

In this project, we will investigate a new smart system made from a hardware component and a software approach that will enable the creation of programmable matter. The hardware component is a mass-producible, sub-mm, MEMS, namely a micro-robot using computationally controlled actuators used for power distribution, communication, adhesion, and locomotion. The software approach aims to provide a language enabling scalable, real-time, efficient, expressive and at the same time safe programming of an ensemble of micro-robots and making this ensemble interacting with others communicating things through the IoT. This research focuses on the main challenge to programmable matter: Scaling. For hardware the challenge is to scale down the size of the individual unit. For software the challenge is to scale up the number of elements that can be effectively controlled with a single, easy to understand program. Moreover, the simulation framework must scale up in the number of simulated micro-robots. We tackle the former by using a true 3-dimensional LSI/MEMS chip integration with deformable substrate as our main manufacturing method and a single effector, for all the necessary functionality of the unit. The latter is tackled creating Foxel a recursively scale-invariant functional shape description language implemented in a logic programming language, Meld, to create programs which are inherently concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant, and also amenable to formal proofs. This project is a follow-up of the Claytronics project initiated by Intel and Carnegie Mellon University and then co-leaded with FEMTO-ST.