Length of position: 1 year (possibly renewable)

We are seeking to recruit a post-doctoral fellow to join a highly motivated multidisciplinary consortium working on development of future smart cards.

The candidate will be based at the Institut des Matériaux et de Microélectronique de Provence (IM2NP), Marseille, France and work under the supervision of Claude Alfonso and Nadia Grillet.
Position will be for one year possibly renewable starting as soon as possible.

Background

The candidate will take part of a research project founded by the House of Innovation and Technology (HIT) in the Aix-Marseille excellence initiative (A*Midex) involving researchers of two laboratories in Aix-Marseille University and Gemalto, one of the international leaders in smart cards fabrication. The aim of the APODISE project is to develop “Autonomous Portable Digital Secure Elements”.
Indeed, secure elements as for instance smart cards require a greater portability, contactless uses, increased autonomy and significant extension of the life cycles.
The teams involved in this project will work on different steps of the fabrication as energy harvesting, protection against the environment and reliability of the components along the time. One of the main goal will be to harvest the surrounding energy to obtain completely autonomous cards. Different energy harvesting solutions will be developed in function of the nature of the energy (light, heat, movement or electromagnetic waves - especially radio-frequencies). Once the best solutions will be clearly identified, the next step will be to fabricate a prototype of a long life autonomous contactless smart card.
The young researcher will be involved at each step of the project.

Research Objectives

The aim of the postdoc will be to characterize the chemistry and the structure of various components implemented in smart cards, their reliability and their ageing. He/she will need to formulate the best characterization strategy by combining the appropriate microscopy techniques depending on the chosen energy harvesting solutions like rectifying antennas, silicides and germanides and photovoltaic solar cells based on organic components, perovskites or amorphous silicon at the appropriate scale from a macroscopic down to an atomic level. Thus, the candidate will work in the microscopy centers of the University (CP2M and CIMPACA) where many equipments at the cutting edge of technology are available (SEM, FIB, TEM). Therefore, he/she will need a strong experience in various advanced techniques of electron microscopy. His/her time will be at 80% in the laboratory to prepare samples, perform electron microscopy studies and analysis. He/she will spend 20% of his/her time in Gemalto especially at the end of the project to work in close collaboration with the company on the fabrication of the final prototype.

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