The EU has set the stage to empower semiconductor manufacturing in Europe being one of the key drivers for innovation and employment and creator for answers to the challenges of the modern society. Aim of IoSense is to boost the European competitiveness of ECS industries by increasing the pilot production capacity and improving Time-to-Market for innovative microelectronics, accomplished by establishing three fully connected semiconductor pilot lines in Europe: two 200mm frontend (Dresden and Regensburg) and one backend (Regensburg) lines networking with existing highly specialized manufacturing lines. Focus is the availability of top innovative, competitive sensors and sensor systems “Made in Europe” for applications in Smart Mobility, Society, Energy, Health and Production. Today competitors are already involved in the development of sensor systems for applications in the emerging “Internet of Things”. But there is a significant gap between those forces and the capabilities to bring ideas into the high volume market fast enough. IoSense will close this gap by providing three modular flexible pilot lines being seamless integrated in the IoT value crating networks and ready to manufacture each kind of sensor system prototypes. IoSense will increase the manufacturing capacity of sensor/MEMS components in the involved pilot lines by factor of 10 while reducing manufacturing cost and time by 30%. IoSense is designed to enable focused development work on technological and application oriented tasks combining with market orientation. “Design to Market Needs” will be accomplished by customer involvement, embedding all required functionality besides sensors. Finally, the time for idea-to-market for new sensor systems is intended to be brought down to less than one year. As a result, semiconductor manufacturing will get a new boost in Europe enabling the industry with competitive solutions, securing employment and providing answers to the upcoming challenges in the IoT era.

The R&D Team of Passerro GmbH has developed the BDVB – Break Down Voltage - Basic Oil Stick. The BDVB Oil Stick, enables for the first-time online measurements of transformer oil dielectric breakdown strength. Using multi-frequency ultrasound spectroscopy, the Oil Stick determines simultaneously break down voltage (BDV), temperature (T) and oil humidity (Wc). Transformers are crucial infrastructure assets of Europe’s and the world’s power grids, which must be controlled and governed carefully. Today’s power supply with huge but fluctuant shares of renewable energy (solar, wind) seriously stresses transformers– leading to an increased degeneration of the transformer insulating oil and thus to a significant influence of performance and decrease of their life time. If the oil’s insulating capacity is down, transformers can’t resist higher voltages as well as the power load and often break down in fire after short circuit. A transformer loss results most often in tremendous damages: loss of production capacity, loss of power supply, loss of grid stability and supply security. The replacement time of power transformers lasts up to 80 weeks and is cost intensive. To date, no reliable online monitoring of the crucial oil parameters is available, and the transformers are operated merely in a manner of blind flying. Passerro developed the BDVB Oil Stick to TRL 6-7. Functionality has been successfully demonstrated, during long-time operation in transformers in Italy, Romania and Germany. The next step is the consequent commercialization and distribution of the device by efficient marketing and business development. The BDVB Oil Stick enables a groundbreaking transformer asset management system and allows the accurate utilization of the grid capacities. Moreover, it is a key enabling technology towards a smart grid.