NIST Measures Out NRI Funding
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 9/13/2007 12:05:00 PM
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said it will contribute $2.76M annually over the next five years to the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), which coordinates research in nanoelectronics among major universities across the country.
The NRI’s primary mission is to identify candidates that will succeed CMOS logic devices by 2020. NRI director Jeff Welser said that besides the additional funding, the main benefit of the NIST-NRI relationship is that the university-based researchers who are pursuing post-CMOS logic devices will now be able to call on NIST experts in test and measurement.
“The ability to measure an electron’s spin or the transport across a sheet of graphene requires advanced measurement capabilities,” Welser said in an interview. “There just aren’t very many places in the world where you can go to measure the magnetic moment of a material. NIST has the equipment and, even more importantly, it has the people that have spent a career developing these kinds of skills.”
James Turner, acting director of NIST, said, “By collaborating with NRI-sponsored researchers, NIST will be able to ensure that its programs focus on developing critical measurement tools likely to accelerate advances in the nanoelectronics field.”
The financial support from NIST raises the annual budget of the NRI to ~$10M annually. The amount is higher when in-kind state contributions from California, New York and Texas are considered.
The NRI is primarily funded by six U.S.-based semiconductor companies, and is part of the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC, Research Triangle Park, N.C.).
The 25 universities that participate in NRI’s programs are assembled into three research centers: the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN), based in California; the Institute for Nanoelectronic Discovery and Exploration (INDEX), based in New York; and the Southwest Academy for Nanoelectronics (SWAN), based in Texas.
The NRI also gets ~$1M per year from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and NRI goals are reflected in several of the NSF-funded programs, said Welser, who earlier worked as a research manager at IBM’s Almaden Research Center (San Jose).
NIST operates labs in Gaithersburg, Md., and Boulder, Colo. Welser said the NIST-NRI relationship opens the door more widely for NIST staffers to work with university researchers.
Earlier this year, NIST issued a major report, “An Assessment of the United States Measurement System,” which calls for developing measurement techniques for frontier technologies, such as post-CMOS electronics.
Companies participating in NRI are Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Freescale Semiconductor Inc., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc., and Texas Instruments Inc.
