First awarded by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation in 2013, the “Trophées des Étoiles de l’Europe” is given to leading research teams in recognition of their commitment to European progress and their skilful coordination of their research projects.

The successful work of the REFERENCE project under the careful guidance of Francois Brunier of Soitec and Yves Quéré of the CEA-Leti research organization led to the project being picked from a group of 30 contenders for the “Stars of Europe” trophy on 16 December 2020. The Minister herself, Frédérique Vidal, took part in a virtual award ceremony to present the coveted prize.

Fraunhofer IZM contributed substantially to the project with Ivan Ndip, Markus Wöhrmann, Uwe Maaß, Tanja Braun and many other colleagues working on the development and high-frequency characterization of wafer-level technologies for packaging HF ICs as well as the package integration and evaluation of miniature passive, low-loss components for HF filter applications.