The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits: bridging the gap between microelectronics technology and applications

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG) is named after a German scientist, researcher and entrepreneur to indicate its combined mission for doing research for and with industry. FhG is a non profit organisation organized in the legal form of an association. Its basis are 47 institutes which are operated as self organizing entities with a common administrative infrastructure. The model is to do research as a part of the scientific community and to transfer this knowledge to industry in a number of ways, by people or by suitable deliverables such as prototypes of products etc. As an example the structure and operation of the Institute for Integrated Circuits is described together with some examples for projects. They indicate that a number of ways can be taken to solve industrial problems by microelectronics, and that know how from systems and applications is required to make microelectronics from a "technology driven" to a "market pulled" operation. The success of FhG as well as of each individual institute is determined by the share of operating budget derived from R&D contracts which is more than 80% in the case of the Institute described.