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Project

MetaMagIC offers a low cost and highly effective way to address current technological concerns regarding the efficiency and sustainability of magnetic devices in Information and Communication Technologies. Driven by an increasing need to achieve the precise control of magnetic fields on progressively smaller length scales – down to the nanoscale - improving the current performance of magnetic devices by the homogeneous concentration of magnetic fields in small and targeted volumes can drastically enhance the device energy efficiency.

In this project, we will address the two key challenges of device efficiency and sustainability simultaneously. Our project introduces a novel and ground-breaking approach targeting the conception, design, development, and implementation of magnetic metasurfaces for controlling lowfrequency magnetic fields at the meso/microscale.

Combining cutting-edge theory and modelling with state-of-the-art techniques for fabricating and characterizing magnetic thin-film devices, we will address important technological challenges: enhancing the sensitivity of magnetic sensors by incorporating them in specially designed planar metamaterials; reducing the negative effects of demagnetizing fields that limit device performance by using metasurfaces, exploiting the non-linear properties of magnetic materials to introduce novel functionalities  into magnetic devices such as self-protection of sensitive equipment to damaging high magnetic fields; exploiting the developed metasurfaces to improve the efficiency of small-scale energy harvesting materials with the goal of generating enough energy to operate low-power electronic devices, combining the field expulsion and concentration properties of metasurfaces to optimize a source and receiver pair for high efficiency wireless energy transfer.

ICMAB Members of the MetaMagIC Project Team
Anna Palau, Lluís Balcells, Narcís Mestres, Aleix Barrera, Jordi Alcalà, Thomas Günkel. / ICMAB-CSIC


Call Topic: Towards Sustainable ICT (S-ICT), Call 2020
Start date: January 2022 (36 months)
Funding support: 1 066 802 €

CHIST-ERA

Funding for this project comes from CHIST-ERA, a pathfinder programme for European projects that focuses on research around Information and Communication Technologies. Particularly, MetaMagIC is part of the “Towards Sustainable Information and Communication Technologies” (S-ICT) Programme, an ERA-NET cofund funding scheme. As ICT’s are predicted to consume up to 20 % of the world’s electricity, the CHIST-ERA S-ICT Projects are researching ways to apply a more sustainable approach to all the areas that affect energy consumption in ICT’s, from computing to manufacture and to disposal.