Projects at Six NSF university centres to strengthen Nanoelectronics innovation
Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) has joined with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to announce funding of $2M in grants for nanoelectronics research at six major NSF centres across ten U.S. universities.
The results of the effort are expected to significantly advance the search for the replacement of the basic semiconductor logic structure that has served the world for more than 30 years.
"Without a breakthrough, the phenomenal advances in semiconductor capabilities will slow drastically as we reach the fundamental limits of current technology in the next decade or so," said Dr. Jeff Welser, director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), a research entity of SRC. "The IT economy has enjoyed unprecedented growth during the microelectronics era of the past half-century. The government and universities have quickly supported the NRI program in order to pursue discovery of the next logic switch and continued leadership in the new nanoelectronics era."
The joint NSF-NRI supplemental grants were awarded to teams at six NSF centres in nanoelectronics research, along with their research leaders.The centres will contribute directly to a primary goal of NRI, the development of an information element that can replace the Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (CMOS FET) in the year 2020 or beyond, as well as the necessary technology to integrate the new information element with CMOS.
The most widely used integrated circuit technology, CMOS is found in almost every electronic product, from handheld devices to mainframe computers.Companies participating in NRI are Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.,; IBM Corp.; Intel Corp.; Micron Technology, Inc.; and Texas Instruments, Inc. They will assign researchers to collaborate with the university teams. Strong interactions with these NSF centres will be instrumental in NRI reaching its goal of demonstrating novel computing devices and their feasibility in simple computer circuits during the next 5-10 years.
"Supplemental grants with the NRI are complementary to NSF's significant fundamental research investments in nanoelectronics," said Dr. Lawrence Goldberg, senior engineering advisor at NSF. "Applying support for additional graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to the six centres' programs should demonstrably advance new concepts and, at the same time, help in developing new generations of researchers in this emerging field."
The NSF-NRI grants are for three-years duration and are in addition to the six grants made to NSF centres last year, expanding and strengthening the commitment to the program.
