Lectures and Classes

The course brings relevant chemistry knowledge, tailored to the needs of electrical engineering students. You will gain understanding of the basic concepts of chemistry and materials science, acquire technology-related practical and analytic skills through the small group activities, laboratory experiments, workshops, and conference sessions as well as guidance through individual projects that require interdisciplinary and critical thinking.

This course targets engineering students and explains material choice, fabrication steps, and working principles behind technologies such as QLED displays, memory storage, or gas sensor devices. The course is built on individual student projects, aiming towards case study based final project on a specific technology. This structure of the course is synchronized with focused lecture and lab series to help towards successful projects. Such a learning-by-doing project-based structure of the course makes it possible for engineers to learn the basics of systems chemistry and to link the material’s structure with properties and existing applications.

You will learn which materials, reactions, and device fabrication processes are important for nowadays technologies and products. You will gain important knowledge of state-of-the-art technologies from materials and fabrication viewpoints. Finally, you will choose selected technology or device and study it in details to establish and understand the link between the structure, properties, and performance of functional materials. By doing this, you will also improve important soft skills, such as academic text writing, presenting, and active learning.

The course covers the status and prospects of post-silicon memory technologies, such as PCM, RRAM, STT-MRAM and FeRAM, and others. You will learn and compare these future memory technologies by means of interactive lectures, group projects, and laboratory sessions. The course employs constructive alignment and active learning teaching concepts.

Decades of research made available several working principles for efficient memory devices, including phase-change of the structure (PCM), materials conversion (OxRAM), ion diffusion (CBRAM), magnetic properties (STT-MRAM), ferroelectricity (FeRAM), and others. Currently, these memory technologies emerge from research to industry, and many predict them at least niche applications for ever-growing hardware market. However, some of technologies (such as PCM) may even conquer the silicon-based flash memory eventually, providing better performance and unique features already now.