of the future, and it also looks in the most unlikely places to find new appr oaches to meet those challenges. While some IT experts ar e busy pushing the bounds of silicon technology, others see the futur e of hardware in non-volatile memory, electron spins, carbon-based materials or biomolecules. Even quantum effects are being studied as a foundation. It should come as no surprise then that a powerful new type of phase change storage received most of the attention at the Eur opean Phase Change and Ovonics Symposium, which was hosted by JARA-FIT in September 2009 and attended by some 90 participants fr om Asia, Europe and the United States. Another JARA-FIT highlight of 2009 was the start of DECISIF , a federally-funded multi-institutional project investigating strained silicon. DECISIF gathers partners from industry and science to study the possibilities that strained silicon offers in the manufacture of faster, more energy-efficient electronic components for laptops, mobile phones and MP3 players. Going forwar d, DECISIF will be an important milestone in the pr oduction of more powerful microprocessors and storage devices that use less ener gy and so have longer operating times. Lastly, the Peter Grünberg Centre opened in Jülich in midMarch 2009. The Peter Grünberg Centre is JARA-FIT’s technology platform for basic research in nanoelectronics and Germany’s first nanoeletronics research institution that is open to outside users. The centr e is named after Forschungszentrum Jülich’s own Nobel laureate, the world-famous physicist Peter Grünberg.
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