ICCUB becomes a Scientifica International technological partner

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) of the University of Barcelona has signed an agreement with the company Scientifica International to work together in the fields of nuclear and particle physics, space sciences and industry. This generic agreement, managed through the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation of the UB, sets the bases for future collaborations between the ICCUB and Scientifica. ICCUB therefore becomes the Scientifica International technological partner and will be its advanced design unit.

Scientifica will study how to bring the developments that are carried out at ICCUB into the market, especially instrumentation, electronics and application specific integrated circuits (ASIC). Both units will collaborate in high technology projects and will enter competitions in international organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA), CERN and ITER.

One of the first licensed products for its trade is the Multi-purpose Integrated Circuit (eMUSIC), carried out at ICCUB. Although it was originally designed for the future telescope Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), eMUSIC can be used for other applications, such as medical imaging, spectrometers, radiation detectors like synchrotrons and particle accelerators.

eMUSIC is an integrated circuit that can expand, process and join the signs that arrive from a high-speed photomultiplier array in a wide dynamic range, which enables developing compact and low-power systems.

The Matrix electronic device, with an analogical-digital conversion function for high-precision time measurement, has also been licensed for its commercialization. This device has been applied to the improvement of the precision in positron emission tomography (PET), used in medical diagnoses.
The area of electronics of the ICCUB Technological Unit (ICCUB-Tech) has worked on six different designs over the last years, producing more than 100.000 units and it now has five patents in the field of photodetectors.

About the Institute of Cosmos Sciences

ICCUB is a UB research center, created in 2006 and distinguished with the accreditation of excellence Maria de Maeztu in 2015. It is also one of the four units that build the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).

The center is dedicated to the fundamental research in the field of cosmology and particle physics, and cosmos sciences technological applications in general.

ICCUB-Tech has expert engineers on instrumentation, electronics and big data management who had worked in several research groups so far, fields in which technology is a key element: mainly for space missions, telescopes, and particle detectors and accelerators.

Another example of an ICCUB project is the application of a data compression algorithm, developed within the framework of the Gaia project, and to fields of genomics, marine geosciences and new nanosatellites to study the Earth.

UB News