Nano-Tera.CH: Nano-technologies for Tera-scale Problems

The Nano-Tera.CH initiative is a broad engineering program in Switzerland for health and security of humans and the environment, currently funded by the Swiss government. The program rationale is rooted in advances in engineering nano-scale materials and their exploitation in a variety of systems, requiring extreme integration and coordinated control of diverse micro/nano-scale components. Embodiments of such systems can be found in lightweight, mobile and personalized products embedded in the environment and on/in the body. These products will enable us, for example, to detect in real time different health risks and conditions through integrated bio probing, to reveal security risks through smart buildings and environments, to save energy through ambient sensing, and to detect and monitor environmental hazards such as floods and avalanches from space and/or inaccessible positions on earth. The outstanding novelty and power of these systems stem from their connectedness and the integration of heterogeneous components. Index Terms — Nanotechnology, nanoelectronics, MEMS, NEMS, VLSI, sensors, software, systems.