Materials and Life Sciences

This course provides ISMIN students with general knowledge of Materials and Life Sciences. It represents only 60 teachinhg hours and cannot provide detailed knowledge of these fields. The course does however provide the ISMIN engineer with basic knowledge in order to be able to exchange and work at the interface with engineers from other different fields: Materials, Energy, Healthcare, Environment … contributing to a more multi-disciplinary training.

New acquired skills : Material properties, introduction to cellular and molecular biology, technical and scientific bibliographies.

The Materials and Life Sciences course consists of 5 course units

1.      Life Sciences (10.5 hrs)

2.      Material Properties (25.5 hrs)

3.      Applied Physics (13.5 hrs)

4.     Laboratory experiments (9 hrs)

5.     Bibliography Project (0.5 hrs, presentation time, no classroom presence).

Presentation and organisation of the course units:

-  Course units 1 to 3 (included) provide theoretical bases. They are organised  around lectures and supervised work classes. Course units 4 and 5  focus on practical and experimental work and personal document compilation for the student.

- The Life Sciences course introduces Bio-technologies, then cellular and molecular biology. It thus provides basic knowledge for applications to sectors such as healthcare and bio-electronics which are then proposed by ISMIN.

- the Material Properties course enables students to approach materials in terms of their properties: i) mechanical, ii) physical, iii) chemical and iv) according to their specific nature (inorganic: metals, semiconductors, and organic: polymers). The student will gain an overall view of material functions, whatever their fields of application might be.

-  the Applied Physics course seeks to provide knowledge of materials for electronics.

Common aims of the course units :

Units 1 to 3 serve as a work baseframe for the experimental courses, 4 and 5. Course units 2 and 3 are the intrinsic subjects taught in materials science but with a very reduced number of teaching hours.

The course is a pre-requirement and a link for the Fundamental and Physical Component Electronics course. In a longer perspective in terms of integrating electronics, these courses are useful to the student providing an overall vision of electronics; i.e. analogue and digital electronics, integrated circuits, bio-electronics, oragnic electronics, flexible electronics, etc. …

The course provides students with the basic knowledge to be able to deal with the physics operating principles of semiconductor components (diodes, MOSFETs, photovoltaic …), which are subsequently used in integrated circuits (analogue electronics and in longer perspective terms, digital electronics).