Magics at a glance

Magics Technologies is a spin-off company from KU Leuven (BE) (Europe’s most innovative university ranked by Reuters, 2020) and SCK•CEN (the largest research institute in Belgium for nuclear technologies, nuclear medicine, and astronautics). It is a European fabless semiconductor company that provides high-reliability, high-performance, fault-tolerant, and radiation-hardened chips for the space, nuclear energy, aerospace, and defense markets. The company’s solutions are designed for use in next-generation mission-critical intelligent systems, including robotics, remote handling systems, drones, satellites, and aircraft.

Magics envisions a future where High-Reliability semiconductors act as catalysts in fostering innovative clean energy solutions, leading interplanetary exploration, and enhancing technologies that safeguard our democratic values. Our mission is to harness advanced digital technologies to empower individuals in the harshest environments, paving the way for secure and dependable clean energy resources, pioneering deep-space discoveries, and promoting a resilient and sustainable future.

At Magics we have successfully implemented a Radiation-Hardening-by-Design (RHBD) flow in the creation of several high-reliability and radiation-hardened product lines, namely, the Vision series, the AI series, the Motion series, and the Time series. Additionally, the company has new product developments planned in the pipeline to further support its growth and establish itself as a European market leader in high reliability semiconductor chips.

Our products enable advances in cutting-edge system and payload solutions for emerging space applications like 5G/6G satellite communication, real-time earth observation, space mining, and deep space exploration. It can also increase satellite service life with our high-reliability components, reducing the need for costly replacements. For our customers in the nuclear industry, our solutions enable more efficient inspection and remote handling tools which help reduce power plant downtime during maintenance and repair; address obsolescence challenges of electronics components faced by power plants while performing lifetime extension to combat energy crisis; enable next-generation nuclear power technologies such as Fusion and Small Modular Reactors.

Magics supports blue-chip companies like ENGIE, Veolia Nuclear Solutions, Ansaldo, and DEME, in addition to working with research organizations and international projects such as ESA, Fusion For Energy and ITER. 

"Go where
no electronics
have gone before"

Jens Verbeeck
Chief Executive Officer

Our values

1.

The future
is interplanetary

2.

Energy drives us forward

3

Teamwork adds value

4.

Dangerous operations should be safe for humanity

5.

Striving for a sustainable world

6.

R&D will enable the exploration of new worlds and the sustainability of our own

Management

Jens Verbeeck

Chief Executive Officer 

Dr. Ying Cao

Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Hagen Marien

Chief Operating Officer 

Board of directors

Vincent Massaut

Director

Prof. Dr. Paul Leroux

Director

Peter Grognard

Director

Board of advisors

Marian Verhelst

Scientific Advisor 

Peter Berben

Business Advisor 

Steven Redant

Strategic Advisor

We are currently hiring

Discover outstanding job and career opportunities. Join a great team. Apply today!

We are currently hiring

Discover outstanding job and career opportunities. Join a great team. Apply today!

Vincent Massaut

Director

Vincent Massaut received a master’s degree in electromechanical and nuclear engineering from the University of Liège in 1982.

From 1992 to 2000, he was a project manager at SCK•CEN, responsible for the BR3 PWR decommissioning project. From 2000 to 2005, he headed the decommissioning and decontamination unit at SCK•CEN. From 2005 to 2007, he was a technical officer at EFDA, Germany, managing R&D contracts in fusion safety and environment.

From 2007 to 2014, he was the head of the fusion research unit and business development manager. This role involved the coordination of all research activities carried out on fusion topics within the SCK•CEN. This also involved national level coordination (through the  European Atomic Energy Community – Belgian State), financial follow up, and control of the activities. With the development of fusion, this also included the management of contracts and proposals for ITER and F4E and the related R&D work. Having responsibility for the management of the Broader Approach agreement participation of Belgium (designated institution), he also coordinated, managed, and followed the various procurements and services carried out by the Belgian industries and institutions active in this programme. Moreover, as a member and co-founder of ITER Belgium, he had extensive contact with industry. He is currently the Deputy Director of Business Development and Support at SCK•CEN.

Prof. Dr. Paul Leroux

Director

Paul Leroux received a master’s degree in Electronic Engineering (ir.) from KU Leuven in 1999. In 2004 he received a Ph.D. in Engineering (dr.) from the same institute. In 2004 he was appointed as a professor in the Engineering Technology Department at Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen in Geel, which has been integrated into KU Leuven’s Faculty of Engineering Technology. He is a member of the Advanced Integrated Sensing Lab (AdvISe) and an associate member of the ESAT-MICAS division. Since 2011, Paul Leroux has headed the multi-campus Electrical Engineering (ESAT) Technology cluster.

Over the years, Paul Leroux has gained expertise in RF, analogue and opto-electronic circuit design. He has also been active in the design of radiation tolerant integrated circuits for harsh nuclear environments like the ITER fusion reactor and the accelerator driven MYRRHA reactor, in collaboration with SCK-CEN, the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre. His current activities focus on radiation tolerant IC design, high accuracy time-to-digital conversion, the design of optoelectronic transmitter and receiver front-ends for optical fibre communication and optical wireless instrumentation (free-space optical radar or LIDAR), indoor RADAR and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) imaging systems for biomedical applications.

Paul Leroux has authored and co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed papers in international journals or conference proceedings. He is an active reviewer for many IEEE, IET and IOP journals. He has been a reviewer for the IWT and for the US Department of Energy and serves as expert reviewer for several EU projects within FP7. He was recipient of the RADECS 2006 best paper award. In 2010 he was granted the FWO-FNRS Prof. Roger Van Geen award for his work on IC design for radiation environments. Paul Leroux is a senior member of the IEEE.

Peter Grognard

Director

Since 2014, Peter Grognard has been  Managing Director and Senior Strategic Advisor at Thales Alenia Space Leuven, where a new generation of spacecraft and launcher electronics is being developed.

He is the Founder of Septentrio, which he led from its inception in 2000 until 2014. Under his leadership, Septentrio played a crucial role in the Galileo programme. Septentrio developed and manufactured the world’s first Galileo receivers, receiving the first Galileo signals in 2006 and the first PRS signal in February 2012.

Prior to his position at Septentrio, Peter was satellite navigation business development manager at the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre in Belgium, S&T attaché at the Belgian Embassy in Washington between 1994 and 1998, and, between 1992 and 1994, member of the Belgian Delegation to ESA. Peter is co-founder of Galileo Services, Europe’s leading Galileo association, and is on the board of various industry associations.

He holds an engineering degree in Applied Physics and a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Brussels, together with an M.Sc. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. Following his graduation in 1988, he started working as a research engineer at the University of Brussels, where he was appointed as an Engineering Fellow in 2015. Peter followed advanced courses in Aerospace Engineering at Rice University, in Management at Stanford University, and in Defence and Security matters at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels.

Marian Verhelst

Scientific Advisor 

Marian Verhelst has been a professor in the ESAT-MICAS group of KU Leuven since 2012. Her research focuses on processing architectures for ubiquitous sensing and machine learning, processor design, and self-adaptive sensor interfaces for edge devices.

Before that, she gained a Ph.D. from KU Leuven, was a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Wireless Research Centre (BWRC) of UC Berkeley and worked in the research labs of Intel Corporation in Portland, OR, USA. Marian sits in various TPCs (ISSCC, DATE, ESSCRIC, tinyML), has published 2 books and several book chapters, holds 4 patents, and has been published in 40+ journals and 100+ conference publications.

Marian has a passion for interdisciplinary collaborations and for science communication and is proud to hold a prestigious ERC grant from the European Union.

Peter Berben

Business Advisor

Peter Berben is Head of Decommissioning and Radioactive Waste Management at ENGIE Corporate.

From 2000 to 2005, Peter was assistant key account manager for nuclear fuel at Electrabel and was key account manager at Tractebel Engineering from 2005 to 2007. From 2007 to 2009, he was a nuclear development manager at GDF SUEZ (now ENGIE) and from 2009 he was adjunct VP responsible for nuclear developments in Eastern Europe.

In 2014, Peter became deputy head of nuclear liabilities and program manager for Decommissioning & Dismantling at Electrabel and from late 2015 he was also head of decommissioning at ENGIE Tecnubel (now EQUANS Belux, Specialized Nuclear Services) and responsible for developments in Germany.

In May 2018, Peter was promoted to Head of Decommissioning and Radioactive Waste Management at ENGIE Corporate, and continues his support to MAGICS TECHNOLOGIES, believing that MAGICS will help him to develop innovative radioactive waste management, dismantling and decommissioning approaches.

Steven Redant

Strategic Advisor

Steven joined imec in 1989 as chip designer in the design group of the then INVOMEC division, focusing on training and supporting academia and  designing chips  for funded projects. He built up expertise in radiation hardening of digital functions and taught VHDL.

At the turn of the century Steven became group leader of the design team, growing it steadily over the years and keeping it on track with technological progress. In this role he was also responsible for  DARE (Design Against Radiation Effects) solutions and the chip projects that were implemented using it.

In 2018 Steven became responsible for the operational aspects of the whole chip value chain at imec.IC-link, encompassing design, manufacturing, packaging, test and supply chain.