RWTH Innovation Award 2019

Two first places go to µKARIA and U-PCM

Every year, the RWTH Innovation Award is given to particularly innovative ideas from the RWTH Aachen University environment. The aim of the award is to anchor the idea of innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the university in order to support good ideas from research to market entry. Three outstanding projects are honoured by a top-class jury.

For the first time, this year, two teams share first place:

Team µKARIA has developed a “Rapid Test to Assess Risk of Calcification”, which allows a faster detection of life-threatening complications. The team consists of scientists from the Department of Design and Development of Microsystems as well as from the Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering – Cell and Molecular Biology.

Team U-PCM with the project " Ultrasonic Accelerated Phase-Change Memory ", whose goal is to optimize data storage and calculation, secured another first place. Scientists from the Institute of Physics (IA), from the Institute of Materials in Electrical Engineering 1 (IWE1) as well as from the Institute of Materials in Electrical Engineering 2 are involved in the project.

Third place went to the project " Quantum Bus for a Scalable Semiconductor Quantum Computer " by the QuTech team. A team of researchers at the JARA Institute for Quantum Information is conducting research on a platform compatible with the semiconductor industry for a universal quantum computer based on spin-qubits. Their now award-winning innovation has made it possible to overcome a major technological hurdle: the coupling of the individual qubits. A patent application is currently being filed for the development and a spin-off is being prepared.