(front left: Prof. Achim Bachem, back left: Thomas Rachel, State Secretary at the Federal Research Ministry, back right: NRW Innovation Minister Prof. Andreas Pinkwart and front right: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Rauhut)

The Rector of RWTH Aachen University, Professor Rauhut, and the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Research Centre Jülich, Professor Bachem, signed a contract at August 6, 2007, which established the Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance JARA. The alliance links fields of excellent research in promising areas at the two institutions with the aim to develop a common research route. Research objectives will be defined and created in a joint process, the infrastructure and equipment available to research and education will be shared, educational activities will be developed together, and personnel and investment decisions will be taken in a corporate process. The overall goal of JARA is to implement the Aachen/Jülich region as one of the top research locations in Europe and one that will be recognised worldwide for research and scientific education. JARA will kick off in four promising fields of research: JARA-BRAIN (Translational Brain Medicine), JARA-FIT (Fundamentals of Future Information Technology), JARA-Energy (Energy Research) and JARA-SIM (Simulation Sciences).

JARA-FIT is an institution, which consists of 18 institutes of the RWTH (10) and the Research Center Juelich (8) belonging to the faculties of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Approximately 40 years ago semiconductor-based information technology initiated an industrial revolution, whose products meanwhile influence almost all branches of our social and economic life. This calm revolution already completely changed the ways of communication, information processing, planning, production and scientific research in modern societies. Very likely, the next decades will develop further application fields, which appear still utopian to us today. The only physical requirement is that the speed of performance improvement typically identified with Moore law of exponential increase in transistor density is going on. However, it is already visible that a simple extrapolation of Moore law by using Si-CMOS technology will fail within the next 10-30 years. Thus, alternative or complementary approaches have to be invented, developed and scaled down in order to improve and add functionality to the current technology. Within JARA-FIT, we will explore the foreseeable physical borders of semiconductor technology using e.g. novel architectures, improvement in structure size, or strain induced increase in mobility, but we will also exploit alternative fields as, e.g., spintronics, non-volatile materials, molecular electronics and quantum information processing. For the sustainable increase of the arithmetic performance and the storage capacity, totally new qualities have to be investigated in addition as, e.g., the coupling of the bio and neuro world to the world of solid electronics. JARA-FIT will be the adequate platform for this type of research by promoting the necessary infrastructure, education and exchange of ideas. Indeed, it is well known that the increasing complexity of information technology requires the multilayered cooperation of different disciplines including an adequate education and the concerted approach of numerous teams of experts with access to an excellent infrastructure. Since the explorative, basic research for information technology is already leading internationally in a number of research areas at RWTH Aachen and Research Center Juelich, an ideal starting point for the creation of a strong alliance in the area of future information technology (FIT) is given leading naturally to JARA-FIT.
The main research topics of JARA-FIT are:

• Advanced and Beyond CMOS
• Remanent Memory and Storage Media
• Magnetoelectronics and Spintronics
• Quantum Information
• Molecular- and /Bioelectronics
• THZ-Electronics
• Advanced Analytics and Preparation

We like to invite all companies and researchers to support us on our way with good and new ideas, brain, projects and knowhow.