This proposal describes the third core project of the Graphene Flagship. It forms the fourth phase of the FET flagship and is characterized by a continued transition towards higher technology readiness levels, without jeopardizing our strong commitment to fundamental research. Compared to the second core project, this phase includes a substantial increase in the market-motivated technological spearhead projects, which account for about 30% of the overall budget. The broader fundamental and applied research themes are pursued by 15 work packages and supported by four work packages on innovation, industrialization, dissemination and management. The consortium that is involved in this project includes over 150 academic and industrial partners in over 20 European countries.

The 2D Experimental Pilot Line (2D-EPL) project will establish a European ecosystem for prototype production of Graphene and Related Materials (GRM) based electronics, photonics and sensors. The project will cover the whole value chain including tool manufacturers, chemical and material providers and pilot lines to offer prototyping services to companies, research centers and academics. The 2D-EPL targets to the adoption of GRM integration by commercial semiconductor foundries and integrated device manufacturers through technology transfer and licensing. The project is built on two pillars. In Pillar 1, the 2D-EPL will offer prototyping services for 150 and 200 mm wafers, based on the current state of the art graphene device manufacturing and integration techniques. This will ensure external users and customers are served by the 2D-EPL early in the project and guarantees the inclusion of their input in the development of the final processes by providing the specifications on required device layouts, materials and device performances. In Pillar 2, the consortium will develop a fully automated process flow on 200 and 300 mm wafers, including the growth and vacuum transfer of single crystalline graphene and TMDCs. The knowledge gained in Pillar 2 will be transferred to Pillar 1 to continuously improve the baseline process provided by the 2D-EPL. To ensure sustainability of the 2D-EPL service after the project duration, integration with EUROPRACTICE consortium will be prepared. It provides for the European actors a platform to develop smart integrated systems, from advanced prototype design to small volume production. In addition, for the efficiency of the industrial exploitation, an Industrial Advisory Board consisting mainly of leading European semiconductor manufacturers and foundries will closely track and advise the progress of the 2D-EPL. This approach will enable European players to take the lead in this emerging field of technology.

We will develop the conceptually new paradigm for ultra-dense and ultrafast magnetic storage that will exceed the current technology by two orders of magnitude in storage density (going from terabit/inch2 to tens of terabytes/inch2) and by about four orders of magnitude in operation speed (going from low GHz to THz for read/write). This will be achieved in an all-optical platform that allows deterministic, non-thermal, low-energy, ultrafast magnetization switching at few nanometers and potentially down to a molecular length-scale. The main building block of the envisioned memory unit in this new paradigm is the spinoptical nanoplasmonic antenna that concentrates pulsed polarized light at the nanometer length-scale and enables non-thermal spin-orbit mediated transfer of the light’s angular momentum (orbital and/or spin) to the nanoscale magnetic architectures. In this way fs-pulsed light, assisted by the plasmonic optical spin-selective antenna and the local electromagnetic field enhancement, allows for the precise control of the magnetic state of nanometer sized / molecular magnetic structures. The project aims to elucidate the fundamentals of the emergence and manipulation of light’s orbital and spin angular momenta to achieve non-thermal momentum-transfer-driven ultrafast switching process, to demonstrate its practical realization, and will map its suitability for future upscaling towards industrial implementation in devices.

The brain is a highly complex, high performance and low energy computing system due to its massive parallelism and intertwined network, which outperforms the current computers by orders of magnitudes, especially for cognitive computing applications. A large effort has been made into understanding the computing and mimicking the brain into an artificial implementation, so-called neuromorphic computing that has received much attention thanks to the advances in novel nanoscale technologies. The current implementation of the neuromorphic computing systems (NCS) using Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies has 5-6 orders of magnitude lower performance (operation/sec/Watt/cm3) compared to the brain. Spintronic devices, using the spin of the electron instead of its charge, have been considered one of the most promising approaches for implementing not only memories but also NCSs leading to a high density, high speed, and energy-efficiency. The main goal of SpinAge is to realize a novel NCS enabling large-scale development of brain-inspired devices outclassing the performance of current computing machines. This will be achieved by the novel structures using spintronics and memristors, on-chip laser technology, nano electronics and finally advanced integration of all these technologies. We expect this unprecedented combination of emerging technologies will lead to at least 4-5 orders of magnitude better performance than the state-of-the-art CMOS-based NCSs. The approach taken in SpinAge is to implement synaptic neurons using novel nanoscale weighted spin-based nano-oscillators, assisted by a low-energy laser pulse irradiation from an integrated plasmonic laser chip, integrated all with the CMOS interfacing electronics for a proof-of-concept of a 16x16 NCS for cognitive computing applications. Our breakthrough platform technology will demonstrate EU leadership of advanced neuromorphic computing.