Midwest Nanoelectronics Research Center Joins NRI Network
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 3/26/2008 8:47:00 AM
The Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) will add a new research center to be based in South Bend, Ind. — the Midwest Academy for Nanoelectronics and Architectures (MANA) — according to an announcement by the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC; Research Triangle Park, N.C.), which oversees the NRI.
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| The MANA center joins three other university and state-funded nanoelectronics centers, which are located in California, New York and Texas. |
Direct funding for research is expected to be ~$25M over the next three years, although the total is ~$61M if use of the existing infrastructure and other in-kind expenses are included, said Bill Gilroy, a spokesman at Notre Dame.
The center will collaborate with researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, Gaithersburg, Md.) and other national laboratories, including the Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, Ill.), and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Tallahassee, Fla.). NIST provides ~$2.75M annually to the NRI effort. The MANA center joins three existing NRI research networks, the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN), based at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX), based at the University of Albany in New York; and the Southwest Academy for Nanoelectronics (SWAN), based at the University of Texas at Austin.
The NRI’s primary mission is to identify candidates that will succeed CMOS logic devices by 2020. The NRI centers draw financial support and research assignees from the six large chip manufacturers, which are members of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA, San Jose). In addition, MANA and the other three MANA centers receive support from the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which receives ~$1.5B in annual support from the U.S. federal government.
More than 25 universities are now involved in the NRI effort. Jeff Welser, director of the NRI, said the device work at the MANA center will focus on tunneling devices, a new area for NRI. “We are most interested in how tunneling can create ‘non-equilibrium’ carrier distributions, with a smaller energy spread than would be normal at room temperature for short periods of time. It is hoped that these distributions can be used in novel ways to do logic at lower energy than a normal CMOS FET.”
On the architecture side, the researchers in the MANA network will be looking at a number of different ideas for logic gates and computational circuits, using the tunneling devices as well as other post-CMOS devices being studied at the other NRI centers, Welser said.
Alan Seabaugh, a professor of electronic engineering at Notre Dame, will be the principal researcher at MANA, working with another Notre Dame professor, Wolfgang Perod, who has been widely published on quantum computing, Gilroy said.
The center is seen as a means of drawing start-up and established semiconductor companies to the region. “In five to 10 years, the goal is to have this area be a significant player in nanoelectronics,” Gilroy said.
