The Zeiss Group, Germany, announces that two Zeiss teams have been nominated for the Deutscher Zukunftspreis – the Federal President’s Award for Innovation in Science and Technology, the first time that two segments of the same company have been nominated.
The team from Carl Zeiss Meditec was nominated for its robotic visualization system, the Zeiss Kinevo 900. The team from the Zeiss Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SMT) segment was nominated for developing EUV lithography.
Members of the Zeiss Kinevo 900 robotic visualization system include Zeiss experts Dr.-Ing. Michelangelo Masini and Frank Seitzinger, representing the Zeiss team; and Prof. Dr. med. Andreas Raabe from the Swiss Inselspital (University Hospital of Bern).
Zeiss Kinevo 900 has introduced robotics, digital visualization, and advanced image augmentation for the fields of spine and neurosurgery, improving efficiency and effectiveness of surgical procedures. Extraction of information from the image – for overlays of fluorescence images or intraoperative visualization of blood flow – help to increase surgical insights during the procedure. Overlaid surgical approaches or highlighted tissue structures can be shown on 4K 3D monitors.
With their project, titled “EUV Lithography – A New Light in the Digital Age,” Dr. Peter Kürz from the Zeiss SMT segment, Dr. Michael Kösters from Trumpf Lasersystems for Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Dr. Sergiy Yulin from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering (IOF) in Jena, have all been nominated.
EUV technology can be used to produce many more high-performance, energy-efficient, and cost-effective microchips than ever before. The reason is that effective digitalization requires computing power to continue rapidly increasing: today’s smartphones are a million times more powerful than the computer that was taken along on the first Moon landing back in 1969. This is made possible by a microchip that is smaller than a fingertip but has the capacity to accommodate more than ten billion transistors. The three nominated teams have made a sizeable contribution to developing and preparing EUV technology for industrial series production. The result is a future-ready technology with more than 2000 patents to back it up.
