The CEA: 80 years
of research and innovation meeting
the most pressing challenges
© CEA
Nuclear, medicine, digital, space, defence, electronics, and more! Since its creation in 1945, the CEA has been behind many great scientific discoveries and technological innovations. These achievements have helped us to meet the challenges of the last eight decades and change millions’ daily lives forever.
At the crossroads of scientific knowledge, technology, markets, uses, industrial needs and public policies, the CEA has adopted a highly original approach. It relies on the alliance between science and technology, with a prominent scientific component, in cooperation with academic partners, in France, Europe and worldwide, and a capacity to respond to the innovation needs of industry.
This approach also benefits from multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, with an ability to draw on, and combine, different areas of expertise, delivering breakthrough technologies and solutions, with a well-established experience of managing major projects, including research and technology infrastructures.
Several decades of cooperation between the CEA and American partners
In the field of nuclear energy, cooperation between the CEA and its US partners, among which the DOE and its National Laboratories, has been very active for several decades, covering both the areas of fission and fusion energy.
In nuclear fission, research work on reactor technologies and their nuclear fuel cycles greatly contributed to the wide expansion of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, bulk and affordable source of energy.
In the field of fusion, France hosts the international ITER project, and the CEA is one of its major scientific partners, namely with its WEST tokamak in operation nearby ITER.
The CEA is involved, alongside with its American partners, in cutting-edge research programs in the fields of high-energy physics, astrophysics, and HPC.
In elementary particle physics, the CEA is associated with the DOE in a proton accelerator project led by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). In the space sector, the CEA is involved in the James Webb program developed by NASA in cooperation with the ESA.
The CEA and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) jointly won in 2022 the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for their collaborative work in high-performance computing and numerical simulation applied to relativistic plasma dynamics.
© Jo Julia Ramsey/SC Photography
On microelectronics, existing collaborations pave the way for ambitious strategic partnerships.
In the field of microelectronics and nanotechnologies, the CEA has tied up with numerous American academic and institutional players such as Caltech, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and NIST.
Strategic industrial collaborations continue to be developed. They started in the 1980s with IBM, covering the dissemination of SOI (Silicon On Insulator) and advanced architectures for the next generation of AI computing, with partners such as
GlobalFoundries and AMD. These collaborations also extend to the manufacture of equipment for semiconductor production, as illustrated by the announcement, in 2023, of the creation of a of a joint laboratory between the CEA and
Applied Materials.
On health technologies
The CEA has been involved in research on health-related technologies ever since its creation. Its goal today is to capitalize on all the expertise developed over the years to contribute to the emergence of the medicine of the future, in close association with clinical research partner organizations and hospitals. Based on cutting-edge fundamental research, it devises and develops smart medical technologies to provide new generations of therapies and move current medicine towards more predictive, personalized, preventive medicine where the patient plays an essential role in the care pathway.