Three vie for 2024 German Future prize
Three teams of technologists from Infineon, ams Osram and LMU Munich are in the short list for the €250,000 German Future prize in 2024.
The three nominees for the German Federal President’s Prize for Technology and Innovation (Future Prize) come from Bavaria, Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia and cover SiC MOSFETs, LEDs and large language model AI that can be run in many more places. The prize is being awarded for the 28th time and is endowed with €250,000.
The ‘digital light’ team at ams Osram and the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin is using individually controllable LED pixels for new applications such as a car headlight that offers greater driving safety through intelligent, adaptive light distribution on the road surface.
The system features more than 25,600 LEDs in a matrix consisting of 320 x 80 light points. With each individual LED being controlled by a digital signal, the headlamp works similar to a video projector. Not only does it illuminate the road ahead precisely and efficiently, but it can also project warning symbols onto the road, such as a snowflake symbol to warn of icy conditions or a special symbol if a wrong-way driver is heading in the vehicle’s direction.
“I am pleased that we are once again among the three finalists for the Federal President’s Award thanks to this formidable innovation”, emphasizes Aldo Kamper, CEO of ams OSRAM. “The German Future Award is a long-standing tradition for us at ams OSRAM: in 2007, an ams OSRAM team won this prestigious award to honor our thin-film technology and in 2016, we were among the nominees. This impressively demonstrates our company’s amazing, long-term innovative power as well as the great significance of intelligent light and sensor technologies for our digital society, today and in the years to come.”
Even beyond the road traffic area, “digital light” provides the technological basis for numerous new applications in augmented reality and human-machine interaction.
The team at the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich with researchers at AI firm nyris is aiming to make generative AI more democratic by using the Stable Diffusion generative AI framework to identify machine parts in seconds based on a photo. This means that if technical systems fail, defective parts can be quickly identified and replaced. In this way, generative AI offers efficient solutions for industrial plants in Germany and around the world.
“Generative AI is about getting a computer to learn how to generate content – such as images,” said Professor Björn Ommer, chair of Chair of AI for Computer Vision at LMU. “With Stable Diffusion, we want to dissolve the resulting dependencies and create AI models that are just as effective but require much less computing power in their application,” says Ommer.
To minimize the memory and processing costs, the researchers devised an innovative approach where the AI first learns a new, effective image description language for local image regions instead of directly describing images in terms of individual pixels.
“As this compact and efficient generative AI can become a catalyst for countless applications, we think it’s important to make the software free with open access to all,” says Ommer. The team is working on further developing Stable Diffusion and creating new applications. “In the long term, the goal is to expand the possibilities of generative AI and above all to render the communication between humans and machines more efficient,” he said.
A team at Infineon Technologies and Chemnitz University of Technology is nominated for the development of a 3300V trench silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET with copper contacts for trains and wind turbines. The technology was use din the CoolSiC XHP2 launched last November.
“The transition towards green energy and many other pressing challenges of our time can only be solved with technological progress,” said Jochen Hanebeck, CEO of Infineon Technologies. “It is therefore important to promote and reward innovation and make it visible in society. The ‘Deutscher Zukunftspreis’ is the most important national award that is presented with this aim in mind. The nomination is a great honour for us and proof of the successful research and development work at Infineon.”
“This nomination shows that climate change and sustainable resource consumption have become central aspects of our society,” said Dr. Peter Wawer, Division President Green Industrial Power (GIP) at Infineon. “Innovative energy solutions and power semiconductors are a core component in decarbonization and fighting climate change, as the expert jury of Deutscher Zukunftspreis has recognized. I am proud that we at Infineon can make a significant contribution to a green future with pioneering technology.”
“For us as a development team, it is a matter close to our hearts to develop innovative chips that contribute to efficient energy consumption and thus also to green mobility on our planet. This nomination is a great recognition for my team, whose tireless efforts, expertise and passion for sustainability have made the technology breakthrough in silicon carbide possible,” said Project manager Dr. Konrad Schraml.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will presents the Deutscher Zukunftspreis to the winning team in Berlin on November 27th.
www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2024/09/240911-DZP-Nominierungen.html
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
