In brief

Launch of the APECS pilot line

© Fraunhofer ISIT

To maintain its hub as a location for innovation and business, Europe needs a strong ecosystem in the semiconductor industry. The pilot line for Advanced Packaging and Heterogeneous Integration for Electronic Components and Systems (APECS) is an important component of the EU Chips Act, aiming to drive chiplet innovations and increase research and production capacity for semiconductors in Europe. The project officially started at the end of 2024. APECS brings together research and development institutions across Europe and is co-funded by the Chips Joint Undertaking and national funding as part of the “Chips for Europe” initiative. The total funding for the APECS pilot line amounts to €730 million over 4.5 years. As a member of the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany (FMD), Fraunhofer IIS is participating in the pilot line with its Smart Sensing and Electronics research division, the Engineering of Adaptive Systems division, and the Development Center X-ray Technology. In particular, we are lending our expertise in the characterization and testing of chiplets: we provide support in chiplet design, chiplet integration, the provision of advanced intellectual property (IP), and the development of demonstrators, such as high-performance computing (HPC).

 

ADA Lovelace Center

Connecting AI expertise for research and business

Six years ago at Fraunhofer IIS, we launched the ADA Lovelace Center for Analytics, Data, and Applications project. Since then, we’ve made significant strides in linking AI expertise and methods with specific challenges and applications. The ADA Lovelace Center has thus established itself as an AI platform that promotes the exchange between research and industry and actively supports strategic international cooperation and the nurturing of young talent.

Now, with the project drawing to a close, we can briefly summarize the results: more than 100 experts published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, over 130 lectures were held, more than 80 theses were written, and 12 doctorates were awarded. One notable outcome is the book “Unlocking Artificial Intelligence,” which features articles from around 70 experts and provides a comprehensive overview of the various fields of AI research and applications.

We see that AI has the potential to increase productivity, improve quality, reduce costs, and foster innovative solutions. Structures such as the ADA Lovelace Center help facilitate the transfer of knowledge between research institutions and companies. That means small and medium-sized companies also get to benefit from specialist knowledge and resources, adding long-term value to the economy.

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© Fraunhofer IIS / Franziska Köhler

AI sets new standards in signal processing

© monsitj - stock.adobe.com

Today’s consumer electronics, telecommunications, and intelligent assistance systems would be inconceivable without digital signal processing. We are now taking the next logical step by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to advance these fields of application. For instance, as part of the Center for Digital Signal Processing using Artificial Intelligence (DSAI), we were able to make progress in aspects of speech and audio signal processing that would hardly have been possible without the use of AI. This enables us to achieve, for example, a further significant reduction in bit rate required for high-quality encoding of speech.

 

New AI language model for Europe

In November 2024, the Teuken 7B language model was published as part of the OpenGPT-X research project in collaboration with Fraunhofer IAIS and other partners under open-source license. The multilingual language model comprises seven billion parameters and was trained from scratch for all 24 official EU languages. With this, Fraunhofer has proven that it has both the expertise and the data to train language and base models without relying on third-party technologies. Next, we aim to develop these models for application domains such as administration and the legal system as well as for edge AI applications in industry, robotics, medicine, and vehicles. To this end, we’re building significant AI computing capacity at our institute, providing our talented researchers with the necessary infrastructure to work with both embedded and specialized models.

 

OpenGPT-X
© Fraunhofer IAIS / OpenGPT-X

Air X-ray system examines car batteries

© Fraunhofer IIS / Paul Pulkert

With the number of electric vehicles on German roads growing steadily, ensuring their safe and reliable operation is in everyone’s best interests. As the battery of an electric vehicle is one of its most damage-prone – and most expensive – components, it takes the primary focus. Precise safety analysis during development or during an energy storage system’s life cycle is still often expensive, complicated, or simply not possible. Help is at hand with the AIR system (a German acronym for traction battery inspection using X-rays) developed by Fraunhofer IIS’s Development Center X-ray Technology: AIR makes it possible to visually assess the mechanical integrity of battery modules by taking a high-resolution X-ray image of the vehicle. To do this, the vehicle is driven into the measuring system, set up similar to a standard car wash. In just ten minutes, the process is complete, and the information obtained can be used to analyze individual components of the vehicle or battery with regard to their position, alignment, or integrity. Thanks to this improved condition assessment, repair costs can be minimized. This can benefit not only vehicle owners through lower insurance premiums, but also buyers on the used car market, who previously had to simply trust that the battery system was in good condition.

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New Work in Nuremberg

New working environments for Fraunhofer IIS: on October 2, 2024, a new institute building was inaugurated at the Fraunhofer site in Nuremberg’s Nordostpark. The Supply Chain Services division and part of the institute’s management team moved in at the beginning of 2025, and the Positioning and Networks division is already based on-site. With this expansion, Fraunhofer IIS is now the largest non-university research institution in the city. The new building’s most striking feature is its “new work” design concept: numerous meeting rooms and state-of-the-art equipment facilitate collaboration and professional exchange. At the same time, the flexibly adaptable new-work environment also offers quiet spaces for more concentrated work. Around 220 employees at the Nuremberg site conduct research in areas such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and sustainability. Together, they develop connected, digital solutions for resilient and sustainable value creation and investigate AI-based localization and networking technologies for robust, energy-efficient IoT systems.

© Fraunhofer IIS / Paul Pulkert

More sustainability with geothermal energy

© Fraunhofer IEG

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft aims to become climate neutral by 2045. It has adopted various measures to achieve this goal, such as reducing energy consumption at all institutes. In 2023, its overall consumption of natural gas fell by around 16 percent.

At Fraunhofer IIS, we want to use geothermal energy to achieve a milestone on the path toward resource-efficient heating; specifically, we want to employ the innovative GeoStar principle developed by Fraunhofer IEG. According to this principle, directional drilling technology allows access to a large volume of rock or soil with minimal surface footprint, so that geothermal energy can be tapped even when there’s little space between existing buildings. Fraunhofer IIS’s Nuremberg site has all the necessary conditions for such medium-depth heat-pump systems, and is set to be equipped with a GeoStar demonstrator in the next few years. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s climate fund is supporting the medium-depth geothermal energy project at two pilot sites in Germany.

Research for Sustainability

In addition to our commitment to improving sustainability at our institute locations in Erlangen, Nuremberg, and beyond, our research at Fraunhofer IIS plays a particularly important role in conserving finite resources and shaping a future worth living: our researchers work on various projects that help in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

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sustainability
© Fraunhofer IIS / Nadja Heindel

Patents in digital transformation

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The importance of patents, especially standard-essential patents (SEPs), for German industry should not be underestimated. SEPs protect technologies that have been declared essential for implementing a standard, which makes them the basis of the digital transformation: neither digital radio nor digital television is conceivable without globally applicable audio and video standards. And mobile telephony, with interoperability of all cell phones in every region of the world, was only realized thanks to international standardization. Our Institute Director and Head of Audio and Media Technologies, Prof. Bernhard Grill, is an SEP expert with many years of experience in the development and licensing of audio codecs. He was able to impart this knowledge at two well-attended lectures at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) and the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA) in 2024. Grill consistently emphasized that standard-essential patents are crucial for the digital transformation.