ALE shares its expertise and Faraday cage

Paris, Strasbourg, FRANCE - May 10, 2022 - Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, a leading provider of communications, cloud and networking solutions tailored to customers’ industries, is partnering with the University of Strasbourg and the CNRS (The French National Centre for Scientific Research) to place a shared Faraday cage in the ICube laboratory (Engineering, Computing and Imaging Sciences Laboratory). This partnership, with the support of SATT CONECTUS, will enable the co-creation of a new common platform for electromagnetic measurements in Strasbourg.

At the end of 2021, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise confirmed its commitment to the Alsace region by moving into new offices in the Illkirch Innovation Park. The move has provided the opportunity for the company to strengthen its ties with the world of research by sharing a Faraday cage with the ICube laboratory. This large anechoic chamber, worth €700,000, and its measurement equipment, will be accessible at the ICube laboratory located on the CNRS campus in Cronenbourg, Strasbourg, France.

The Faraday cage, or anechoic chamber, is a room whose walls absorb electromagnetic waves and is used for scientific experiments. The space allows researchers to carry out electromagnetic measurements without any disturbance.

A platform shared between academic and industrial research

This exceptional equipment will be jointly used by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise's engineering teams and researchers from the ICube to characterise developed systems, such as fast imagers, magnetic or chemical sensors or energy recovery and management systems.

The chamber being hosted within ICube will allow the consolidation of the laboratory's research on the themes of industrial connected objects, power electronics, nuclear detectors, and in particular the development of systems and microsystems for the environment, biomedicine, imaging and energy, thanks to its research team in electronics and microelectronics (SMH: Heterogeneous Systems and Microsystems). This electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) standards testing platform will also facilitate the acceleration of technology transfers from the laboratory to industry, by strengthening the laboratory's expertise in the design of systems dedicated to biomedical sciences.

"Hosting this unique facility in the region, which allows very precise measurements of electromagnetic radiation, will strengthen the interactions between ICube and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, but will also accelerate the laboratory's technology transfer and create new scientific collaborations throughout the region," said Michel de Mathelin, director of the ICube laboratory.

A place for training

"This collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will favour exchanges and partnerships for research projects and will support teaching by the laboratory's teacher-researchers. Indeed, the chamber will be open for educational purposes through a national training platform that will be managed by the Grand-Est pole (the MIGREST pole) of the National Coordination of Training in Microelectronics (the CNFM). This platform will train engineering, master's degree and University Institute of Technology students in electromagnetic compatibility," said Wilfried Uhring, professor at the laboratory and director of the CNFM's MIGREST division.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise engineers, who are experts in EMC testing, will train professors and researchers in the use of the platform and impart their knowledge. In time, this industry/research/teaching platform will become a centre of excellence and expertise in electromagnetic measurements in the Grand Est region. New national, regional and local collaborations may also be initiated, for example with the microelectronics development team of the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC, CNRS/ Unistra), that also participated in financing the project.