LONDON — Europe's Catrene program, the follow on R&D initiative to take electronics into the nanoscale era, has put out a further call for project proposals, and small to medium sized companies, research organizations and academic institutions have until April 30th 2009 to submit proposals.

Catrene (Cluster for Application and Technology Research in Europe on NanoElectronics), is a four-year program, set to operate under the auspices of the Eureka program and started on Jan. 1 2008.

It is earmarked to make use of 4,000 person-years of effort each year, equivalent to about 6 billion euro for the extended program, which builds on set to build on Medea+ and its predecessors Medea and Jessi.

Commercial participants in Eureka projects can usually get half their costs paid by their national governments while academic institutions can get up to 75 percent of their costs paid.

The first phase of the research initiative involves 12 projects that resulted from the first call last year, and involves 4,000 researchers in 140 organizations from 13 countries.

This second call opens on March 2nd, and project labelling is planned for the end of September 2009. Chosen projects will likely commence January 2010.

The program's main aim is to work on achieving leading positions for Europe in a number of key applications areas.

It has defined several headline projects, dubbed 'Lighthouse Projects' which address major socioeconomic needs such as transportation, healthcare, security, energy and entertainment through focused R&D programs.

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