Advanced functional materials and their applications

Summary form only given. Information Society needs rapidly increasing amounts of stored information and speed of their transmission. This leads to small dimensions and volumes of components. Tasks performed previously by large machines or systems, can now be performed by small robots and desktop computers. With microsystems a further miniaturisation of equipment is possible, due to the exploitation of various properties of materials enabling perform different functions like sensing, actuation, light emission etc. In this talk various properties of materials enabling their different applications will be described with a particular emphasis given to materials and structures promising new developments in electronics, optoelectronics, and microsystems.