Major challenges of the European and worldwide society such as the climate crisis, insufficient environmental protection, food and pharmaceutical shortages, and military aggressions require technologies that substitute fossil fuels with sustainable energy sources in basically all industries. Following the green deal of the EU commission, the European continent shall become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The chemical industry is a major contributor to CO2 emissions, as it accounts for about 30% of the industrys total energy use worldwide. Even though so-called photochemistry promises to sustainably produce chemical compounds by (sun)light, corresponding reactors suffer from insufficient light management, even in modern micro flow reactors, which hinders their upscaling to applications in industry. This is exactly where the key to the technological and economic breakthrough lies, and this is where reaCtor comes into play. It will contribute to the ambitious goal of a sustainable chemistry by developing and validating a novel type of light-driven chemical reactor with enormous scale-up potential for industrial applications. It will be based on an interdisciplinary and innovative technological approach, combining optical fibres for smart light management, metallic nanoparticles as efficient energy transmitters, nano- and micro-fabrication for micro-fluidic functionalization as well as monolithic optical integration, and flow chemistry as an eco-friendly and safe chemical technology. For the first time, a demonstrator of the novel reactor architecture will be set-up and benchmarked with relevant photochemical reactions. Ultimately, the proposed fibre-based microfluidic reactors will enable implementation of new and efficient routes driven by light to prepare pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and materials on both lab and industrial scales.

PHACTORY is a unique pan-European consortium operating as a one-stop-shop virtual factory for photonics innovation support of European industry. PHACTORY brings together over 30 partners representing Europe’s top competence centers in photonics. Together the PHACTORY partners offer open streamlined access to the full spectrum of photonics technologies, expertise and supply chain activities from TRL2-7 including pilot lines and PIC foundries, combined with specialist partners in business, investment, intellectual property, and EU manufacturing support services to maximize the commercial impact from the project. PHACTORY’s ambitious work plan builds on the proven track record of over 20 years of successful collaboration between the consortium partners in previous similar EU projects and aims to go well beyond the current state-of-the-art in terms of its impact. PHACTORY will reach out broadly to European industry, especially SMEs, start-ups, and scaling companies, predominantly as first users and early adopters, to generate a critical mass of 125 carefully selected support cases with the highest potential for commercial impact. PHACTORY will work closely with the selected support cases, providing deep technology support interventions for TRL acceleration through intensive cross-border collaborative innovation projects, combined with tailored business supports to accelerate the investment readiness levels (IRL) of the supported companies. As a result, PHACTORY expects to achieve a quantified impact of at least 1250 new EU jobs, 937M€ in new company revenues, and 190M€ in new venture capital on aggregate within the supported companies directly related to the delivered PHACTORY innovation supports. The PHACTORY project will simultaneously strengthen the European photonics innovation ecosystem with more complete and mature value chains linked to EU manufacturing which are integrated into the PhotonHub Association for sustainability of the innovation support services.

Many different environmental impacts arise from electronics, and the handling of electronic waste (e-waste) is rising quickly to the top of the agenda. E-waste is a significant issue for Europe: Improving its management is an explicit goal of the Green Deal objectives and the Circular Economy Action Plan (3.1. Electronics and ICT). However, due to the requirement to involve the whole value chain, from raw material suppliers to consumers, the complex material background and supply chain, as well as the multitude of competing interests, achieving circularity in the electronics industry is challenging. The main aim of the EECONE project is to reduce e-waste on a European scale. To this end, 54 entities (47 partners, 2 associated partners and 5 affiliated entities) from 16 European countries covering different sectors of activity have joined forces to propose practical ways of reducing the volume of e-waste in the EU. Crucially, the entities that make up EECONE represent all parts of the value chain. EECONE’s approach is interdisciplinary, covering the social, economic, technological, and policy aspects. The environmental impact arising from e-waste can thus be reduced by working in three principal areas: a) Increase service lifetime of electronic products by application of ecodesign guidelines for increasing their reliability and their repair rate, thereby reducing the volume of e-waste. Reduction and replacement of materials to decrease the impact of e-waste. b) Improved circularity by reusing, recycling, and waste valorising materials/elements from electronic products. EECONE’s vision is to develop and embed the constraints linked to managing the end-of-life of electronic products from the very beginning – in the development or process design. EECONE is paving the way as a first step toward a zero-waste electronic industry. The “6R concept will fully guide EECONE” (Reduce, Reliability, Repair, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle). To deploy its ambitious vision, the EECONE project defines four main objectives: a) Define green. Create clear, simple, open tools to define and design ECS for circularity. Generate, for the first time, a clear framework aiding producers to evaluate their choices and pathways to ecodesign, to foster European leadership in the green transition. b) Make green ECS (Electronic Components Systems): Provide innovative techniques for reducing, repairing, reusing, refurbishing, recycling to decrease e-waste and boost circularity in a new generation of electronics. c) Showcase green solutions: Demonstrate innovation potential, usability, and versatility of the green solution along the value chain. d) Building consciousness: Create an ecosystem empowering the 6R ECS generation. EECONE is a major opportunity to create a European ECOsystem for greeN Electronics and to position Europe as a role model for low environmental impact electronics.

H2TRAIN proposal is funded on the sixth edition of the Electronic Components and Systems (ECS) Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (ECS-SRIA) topics and major challenges for enabling digital technologies in holistic health-lifestyle supported by artificial intelligence (AI) networks. Biosensors for e-health and smart tracking of sport and fitness are a class of devices that is dominating the consumer and professional market with an unprecedented growth. Despite the impressive capabilities of recent approaches, several prospective revolutionary improvements are still open points, mainly in relationship with four factors: sensing new biosignals and tracking new activity patterns; improving battery lifetime and energy management for continuous use; and secure, reliable and efficient data analysis with AI algorithms and connectivity with the IoT. H2TRAIN aims at advancing the state of the art in this respect, taking profit from the remarkable properties and synergistic potential of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) materials (1DM and 2DM), enabling more sensitive, efficient, and miniaturized biosensing capabilities within the established CMOS technology framework. This will contribute to the growth of e-health services assisted by AI and will fortify the development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in health & wellbeing and digital society. H2TRAIN not only facilitates digital technology but also involves the development of new 1DM and 2DM-based devices for sensing, energy harvesting and supercapacitor storage. These innovations serve to integrate sport and health activities into IoT applications, making them accessible as wearable technology. H2TRAIN combines mature CMOS technology products for health and sport sensing with embedded intelligence as a cross-sectional technology. This combination offers a broad spectrum of technology demonstrators (TD) based on advanced sensors, such as tattoo sweat, C-reactive protein, cortisol and lactate.

EU-TRAINS aims to reinforce the supply chain on sensors for biomechanics and cardiovascular system real-time monitoring targeting applications in the fields of fitness and healthcare. It leverages from the strength of EU digital microsystem and design to support a 100% made-in-Europe supply chain of solutions which encompass smart-textile integration as well as advanced AI-based edge-cloud data processing. In details the following outcomes are foreseen: - Textile integrated electronic systems for real-time monitoring of hearth, respiratory and movement parameters on-the-air and in-water through an interdisciplinary approach; - Semiconductor technologies which allow the re-use of micro-nano systems both in the sports and in the healthcare sectors; - Miniaturized devices allowing the capturing of bio-chemical parameters able to withstand harsh ambient conditions such as salt fogs, chlorine, detergents, high and low temperatures, etc. The following key activities are targeted: - Development, prototyping and demonstration of versatile sensors with edge AI features for improved precision and reliability, that can also be integrated in textiles as well as in smart wearable wrist-watches and in sport equipment and gears targeting also underwater applications; - Cloud-edge Artificial Intelligence combined approaches for reliable diagnosis of body parameters. This will comprise sensor’s self-learning, remote update, multi-sensing approaches based on sensor arrays; - Novel materials that support electronics printing in textiles with stretchability and self-healing capabilities. Societal benefits are foreseen in the transition to a healthier lifestyle by promoting regular physical activity through affordable tools and services for a large audience, including people with disabilities. Moreover, this will impact the smart/remote-healthcare sector which will benefit of the availability of low-cost microfabricated solutions for intelligent, versatile, connected body sensors.