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Nanoelectronics Research Grants Awarded to U.S. Universities
Online staff -- Electronic News, 12/8/2005
Following increasing noise about the fear of U.S. semiconductor research falling behind, nanoelectronics research at U.S. universities is getting a boost thanks to the first research grants under the Semiconductor Industry Association’s (SIA) new Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), meant to benefit the long term needs of the semiconductor industry.
The grants are funding the creation of new university-based nanoelectronics research centers in California and New York, as well as supporting additional research at five National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscience centers and at a research group in Texas.
The first of the new research centers the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN), based at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in Calif. WIN participants will come from University of California campuses in Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara as well as from Stanford University.
WIN will focus on novel spintronics and plasmonic devices and will also receive additional direct support from Intel and the UC Discovery program.
The other new research center is the Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX), headquartered at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering of the State University of New York-Albany in Albany, N.Y. INDEX also includes the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Yale University to focus on the development of nanomaterial systems; atomic-scale fabrication technologies; predictive modeling protocols for devices, subsystems and systems; power dissipation management designs, and realistic architectural integration schemes for realizing novel magnetic and molecular quantum devices.
INDEX is also set to receive additional direct funding from IBM, and support from New York State is expected.
Industry consortium Nanoelectronics Research Corp. (NERC), a subsidiary of Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), and NSF also announced today a total of $2 million in supplemental grants for nanoelectronics research during 2006 at five existing NSF nanoscience centers. The centers are Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, Center for Nanoscopic Materials at the University of Virginia, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Center for Electronic Transport in Molecular Nanostructures at Columbia University, and Center for Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications at Harvard University.
In addition, NERC announced an individual grant to the research team led by Professor Banerjee at the University of Texas at Austin for exploratory work in spintronics, and NSF announced an additional supplemental grant for nanoelectronics research to the Center for Semiconductor Physics in Nanostructures at the University of Oklahoma/University of Arkansas.
The companies participating in NRI are Advanced Micro Devices, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Intel Corp., Micron Technology, and TI, which will assign researchers to collaborate with the university teams. Strong interactions between these centers and their activities will be instrumental in NRI reaching its 15-year goal of demonstrating novel computing devices with critical dimensions below 10 nanometers and incorporating them in simple computer circuits, the groups said.
Larry Sumney, president and CEO of SRC said in a statement, “The research results from this new initiative will enable the semiconductor industry to extend Moore’s Law far beyond the year 2020 when the potential limits of the current industry technology may be approached.”
Lawrence Goldberg, senior engineering advisor at NSF added, “The supplemental grants will support additional graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the centers’ research programs, thus leveraging NSF’s significant fundamental research investments in nanoelectronics.”
“We believe this type of cooperative effort with NRI can have a large impact in accelerating advancement of new concepts and in developing future cadres of industry and faculty researchers to help drive the field,” he concluded.
