Case Studies

Europe’s manufacturers face the challenge of producing consistent, high-quality products using high-temperature heat treatments. Laser hardening is a surface strengthening process in which a laser heats a small area of a component’s surface to high temperatures just below the melting point to create a hard and wear-resistant fi...

Semi-conductors are manufactured using precision instrumentation in a clean-room environment, as even a single speck of dust can lead to the failure of a high-value product. As components on semi-conductor processors get ever smaller and more sensitive to contamination, there is an increasing requirement to manufacture in a vac...

Multi-junction solar cells (MJSC) are made up of layered semiconductors that, together, absorb a wider range of solar energy than silicon alone. Higher energy conversion efficiencies for this type of cells are predicted, that, in time, may enable photovoltaics to become cost-competitive with conventional energy sources. Manufac...

The promise of 5G is revolutionary advances in mobile device user experience, sufficient to drive a transformation in personal connectivity, and form a platform for new market opportunities. 5G is less of a technology platform, more a performance specification, defined by low-latency, multi-Gigabit per second data capacity, lo...

Telecommunication systems mostly rely on ‘singlemode’ optical fibres that allow only one path or ‘mode’ for light to travel as it propagates through the fibre. However, in many important industrial applications, such as in avionics or the automotive industry, ‘multimode’ fibres are required. In multimode fibres light can follo...

Over the next decade or so, methods currently used to encrypt data may become ineffective in the face of advances in quantum computing, potentially leaving communication networks and services vulnerable to eavesdropping. Security could instead be assured by Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a category of technologies that apply q...