This project is very important for the industry and UNE’s work in the project will hep creating new standards from some results of NICKEFFECT that will ease the market uptake of these results and their impact beyond the duration of the project
Welcome to
NICKEFFECT
Boosting the research and development of new solutions
for materials replacing the Platinum Group Metals (PGM)
NICKEFFECT in a Nutshell
NICKEFFECT, a new project co-funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme, aims to develop novel ferromagnetic Ni-based coating materials to replace the scarce and costly Platinum and ensure high efficiency in key applications.
Running from June 2022 until June 2026, the NICKEFFECT project is led by a consortium that is a multidisciplinary team comprised of 12 partners from 7 different EU and HEU-associated countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom). It covers stakeholders of the whole project value chain: scientific and technology developers, technology providers, end-users, as well as transversal partners.
Project Goals and Objectives
Synthesise ferromagnetic coating materials to replace Platinum as raw material;
Develop measures to ensure that the materials are affordable, durable and with increased corrosion resistance for the different working environments;
Successfully upscale production process in pilot plant to coat real scale components;
Ensure a safe and sustainable by-design approach and define pathways for the recovery, recyclability, purification and re-use of materials at the end of the products life;
Develop a decision support tool to facilitate the adoption of the safe and sustainable criteria when designing and producing metallic coatings free of PGMs;
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Latest News
The NICKEFFECT project, represented by partner Singulus Technologies AG, successfully exhibited its cutting-edge advancements at SEMICON Europa 2025 in Munich, focusing on green and sustainable data storage. Aligned with the event’s theme of European economic resilience, the exhibition highlighted the latest results on Platinum (Pt)-free, non-volatile MRAM stacks, a key development in reducing reliance on critical raw materials. Product Manager Matthias Landmann shared these innovative process developments at the Singulus stand, underscoring the project's commitment to enabling a technologically advanced and environmentally sustainable future for the microelectronics industry.
A significant breakthrough from the NICKEFFECT consortium, led by researcher Aitor Arredondo of the UAB, demonstrates a promising path toward future low-power magnetic devices by eliminating the need for expensive and scarce Platinum Group Metals (PGMs). His doctoral thesis, "Oxygen Magneto-Ionic Effects in NiCo-Based Structures," focuses on magneto-ionics, a novel technique that uses small voltages to move ions—like oxygen—within a material, thereby controlling its magnetic behavior without high electric currents. This shift to Pt-free Ni/Co multilayers offers a dramatic reduction in energy consumption for devices like next-generation MRAM, aligning with Europe's goal to reduce reliance on critical raw materials and champion energy-efficient technologies for data-intensive applications such as AI and neuromorphic computing.
For machine learning (ML) in high-tech materials development, where high-quality experimental datasets are typically small (hundreds of samples), developing reliable models requires specialized techniques like Uncertainty Quantification (UQ). UQ focuses on making a model "know what it doesn't know" by requiring it to predict not just the material property, but also its confidence level in that prediction. A common approach to achieve this is ensembling, where multiple models are trained slightly differently, and the standard deviation of their individual predictions is used as the measure of uncertainty. This uncertainty is critical because it allows for strategic post-processing, such as filtering out highly uncertain predictions (a process known as sparsification) to significantly reduce the overall prediction error, thereby enabling high-accuracy predictive modeling of new materials despite the constraints of limited data.
Testimonials
"Very important for the industry"
Esther Bermejo Núñez
Project Manager, Gas, Chemicals and Textiles
"Generate a deep impact"
NICKEFFECT’s results will generate a deep impact, during and beyond the project execution. I expect novel coatings and models to allow inferring new insights which will constitute the basis for getting improvements in both the materials’ design and the process development.
Danijel Pavlica
Project Manager
"New PMG type of catalysts"
Advent mission is to advance the development and manufacturing of advanced materials, components, and next-generation fuel cell technology to unlock the hydrogen economy. In NICKEFFECT we expect to demonstrate new PMG type of catalysts for HT-PEM and electrolyzers of higher performance and stability.
Christos Chochos
Director of research at Advent
"Reduce cost stack and improve sustainability"
NICKEFFECT project will reduce cost stack and gain autonomy regarding the sources of critical materials such as Pt located mainly in Russia and South-Africa. Will also improve the sustainability by providing solution for the end of life before the product is placed on the market and by selecting materials according to a interoperable sustainability assessments.
Joséphine Steck
Research engineer at CEA
"Real game changer towards faster innovation"
The combination of high-level experiments and computer simulations will be a key success factor of NICKEFFECT. This is a real game changer towards faster innovation, research and development of more sustainable materials and applications.
Gian-Marco Rignanese
Chief Innovation Officer at Matgenix
"Strongly affect the industry"
NICKEFFECT will strongly affect the industry by developing and validating at least 3 new materials, together with the coating methodologies (including process modelling) and decision support tools for materials selection (integrating safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) criteria and materials modelling).
Elias Koumoulos
CEO at IRES