Altreonic is engaged in a project thinking about (very) long life electronic devices. Practically speaking, long live means either they last a life time, either the device is used in environmental conditions subjecting it to accelerated ageing often due to agressive stress (vibration, chemical, radiation).
The project aims at researching novel approaches to develop resilient embedded programmable semiconductor devices with a very long life time, set at a symbolic goal of 100 years, even if some domains like bio-medical have already requirements spanning a lifetime of 70 to 80 years. A second domain is made up by applications where the devices are subjected to higher than normal stress resulting in a higher probability of failure. A third domain is focused on develiping consumer devices that have a much longer useful life than it is the case today.
This requires a holistic systems engineering approach, covering multiple domains such as system architecture, mechanical design, electro-chemical behaviour, software architecture, semiconductor technology and architecture, energy harvesting and non-functional aspects like long term reuse and maintainability. Application domains are diverse: infrastructure, transport systems, energy grids, bio-medical, consumer devices, aerospace and many other. The main goal is to make a significant step towards developing resilient high reliability devices in a cost-efficient way. We expect benefits that apply equally well to the current day engineering end development of high reliability systems, especially as the shrinking of the semiconductor elements is gradually eroding the robustness margins so that even at shorter lifetimes reliability becomes an issue.
The project will benefit from analysing typical use cases and applications where this is case. If interested to be part of the project or its user group, please contact us at long.live (@) altreonic.com