On 7th of July promising business ideas have been awarded for the 10th time in the town hall of the City of Aachen by the initiative „AC² – Foundation, Growth and Innovation”. The first prize endowed with 10 TSD Euro went to the Team “Protemics” from AMO, Aachen.

The team consisting of Christopher Matheisen, Marcel Meuer, Dr. Michael Nagel, Simon Sawallich and Ali Safiei convinced the jury with their business idea based on a new non-destructive measurement technique for the testing of multiple properties of microstructures and the localization of defects in e.g. semiconductors, solar cells and touchscreen displays.

A unique selling proposition of Protemics is given by their novel patented microprobes which the team developed in frame of basic research work at AMO as well as the Institute of Semiconductorelectronics at RWTH Aachen University. These contact-less working optoelectronic sensors are capable of sending and detecting locally concentrated pulses of electromagnetic signals in the THz frequency range. With this capability it is possible to surpass the performance of prior analytic methods in terms of measurement speed and spatial resolution by many orders of magnitude.

The team is financially supported in frame of a project (EXIST-Forschungstransfer) funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) and the Europian Social Fund (ESF).