Research Triangle Park, North Carolina–The Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), the chip industry’s long-term research consortium, awarded $29.3 million in university research contracts during 2000. New or additional funding went to more than 200 projects at 68 universities.
“The SRC is proud to support some of the most exciting integrated circuits research in the world,” says Dr. Ralph Cavin, SRC’s vice president for research. “The SRC’s research portfolio was as vibrant as any previous year in our history, and included our first Asian international research contract with National Taiwan University.”
The largest contract of the year, worth $2.5 million, was awarded to Dr. John R. Hauser of N.C. State University for research on front-end manufacturing processes. Hauser’s work addresses the new materials and processes required to fabricate millions of high-quality transistors while scaling to the sub-100-nm feature size.
Dr. Shyam Murarka at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $1.43 million to develop high-performance interconnect systems for submicron integrated circuits.
A research contract of $1.22 million was awarded in 2000 to Dr. William Oldham of the University of California, Berkeley, to study lithography for terascale electronics. The project examines several aspects of lithography research, from extreme ultraviolet and electronic beams to computer-aided design and data processing tools.
The fourth largest research contract, $760,000, went to Dr. Franco Cerrina of the University of Wisconsin for his research in advanced masks, photo-resist materials processes, image formation and modeling, thin polymer films, and thermomechanical properties of thin films.
SRC research contracts also went to the following colleges and universities: Arizona; Arizona State Auburn; California-Davis; California-Irvine; California-Los Angeles; California-Riverside; California-San Diego; California-Santa Barbara; California-Santa Cruz; Carnegie Mellon; Central Florida; Clarkson; Colorado; Cornell; Duke; Florida; Florida International; Georgia Tech; Harvard; Hawaii; Illinois-Urbana Champaign; Iowa; Johns Hopkins; Lehigh; Maryland; Massachusetts-Amherst; Michigan; Minnesota; MIT; National Taiwan; New Hampshire; New Jersey Institute of Technology; North Texas; Northwestern; Notre Dame; Ohio State; Oregon State; Pennsylvania; Penn State; Portland State; Princeton; Purdue; Rochester; Rochester Institute of Technology; Rutgers; Sil Integration; South Florida; Southern California; Stanford; SUNY-Buffalo; Tennessee-Knoxville; Texas A&M; Texas-Austin; Texas-Dallas; Texas Tech; Toronto; Utah; Vanderbilt; Virginia Tech; Washington; Washington State; Wisconsin-Madison; and Yale.