News and Pressroom

On 17 November, Eric Fribourg-Blanc, Senior Programme Officer at the Chips Joint Undertaking (Chips JU), visited Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen. He was accompanied by Dirk Schumann, director of the APECS Pilot Line at the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany (FMD). The visit focused on the APECS Pilot Line, a central pillar of the EU Chips Act, which advances the development and transfer of novel chiplet technologies into industrial application.

Fraunhofer researchers have developed a system that uses sensors and AI to monitor a driver's cognitive load. In the future, this technology could ease driver strain when they reach their stress limit. The system can also be applied in other fields, such as for pilots or surgeons. The researchers are using an innovative sensor network for the project – as well as a PC game for preparing virtual sushi.

Erlangen — In conjunction with his appointment as professor of Information Technology and Electronics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Giovanni Del Galdo will join the institute management team of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS on November 1, 2025. Previously, he served as a professor at Technische Universität Ilmenau and headed the Electronic Measurements and Signal Processing department at Fraunhofer IIS.

Erlangen, Germany – As the consortium leader of the EU-funded project SpikeHERO, Fraunhofer IIS is setting its sights on fiber optic networks over the next four years. Together with industry and research partners from the Netherlands, Czech Republic, and Belgium, the institute is developing AI chips based on spiking neural networks to significantly improve signal quality and boost data transmission rates in fiber optics. The project launches on October 1, 2025 and is intended to help expand Europe's digital infrastructure and consolidate its technological sovereignty.

Erlangen (Germany): For quite some time now, Fraunhofer IIS has been delivering MPEG-H Dialog +, a dialogue enhancement solution for broadcast and streaming. The codec separates speech from the rest of a film’s soundtrack and enables its separate enhancement. The audience can then choose between content with the original audio mix and content with easy-to-understand dialogues, providing an ideal solution for people with hearing disabilities, for instance. The latest feature of MPEG-H Dialog+ is available on the video on demand platform of the German-French broadcaster ARTE and will be operational in a few days.

Erlangen/Munich (Germany): The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and ARRI today announced a partnership to combine their expertise in the field of high-quality image coding, color science and cinematic image processing. The goal is to enable transport and storage of highest-quality image data in media and post-production workflows while maintaining full processing flexibility. This collaboration aims to significantly enhance the quality and performance as well as the time-cost-efficiency in current and future media production.

Erlangen, Germany / North Hollywood (CA), USA: The Fraunhofer-Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is excited to announce that its moving picture technol-ogy experts receive the world-famous Emmy® Award for engineering, science and technology for its JPEG XS video codec. This forward-looking standard for professional video production pushes the boundaries of high-quality transmis-sion over IP for a wide variety of applications in media and studio technology and streamlines real-time video processing in data centers.

Maintaining wind turbines and identifying potential vulnerabilities is expensive and time-consuming, especially when they are located offshore. As a result, rotor blades are often simply replaced, a costly process, when damage is merely suspected. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, working in concert with the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems IWES, has developed a solution that can be used to identify cracks and breakage inside the blades remotely at an early stage.

Erlangen (Germany): At the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, researchers at the departments Smart Sensing and Electronics and Supply Chain Services have successfully developed a novel hardware accelerator to reduce the effort of the computationally expensive pricing step in the Simplex Algorithm. This innovative technological breakthrough was presented at the International Symposium on Highly Efficient Accelerators and Reconfigurable Technologies (HEART 2025) conference in Japan in May 2025.

JPEG XS — Forward-Looking Standard for Professional All-IP Video Production: Existing video codecs involve accepting longer lag times or quality losses during transmission of image data in production environments. They also require a relatively large amount of computing power to decode the data, which means expensive hardware must be used and more energy is consumed. A team of researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen has now developed JPEG XS, a state-of-the-art and forward-looking image compression format that transfers high-quality images with minimal latency, low resource use and almost lossless image quality. For this innovative project, the researchers were presented with the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize for 2025 at the Fraunhofer annual assembly.