Dec. 9, 2005 – A consortium of companies has announced its first research grants under the Semiconductor Industry Association’s new Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI).
The grants will fund the creation of two new university-based nanoelectronics research centers — one in California and the other centered in New York — as well as support additional research at five National Science Foundation nanoscience centers and at a research group in Texas.
The two new research centers are The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) in California and The Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX) in Albany, N.Y.
WIN will be headquartered at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Participants will come from three University of California campuses (Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara) and Stanford University. The institute will focus on novel spintronics and plasmonic devices. In addition to its NRI funding, it will also receive additional direct support from Intel and the UC Discovery program.
INDEX will be headquartered at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering of the State University of New York-Albany. It will include also the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Yale University.
The New York-based institute will 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. It will also receive additional direct funding from IBM, and the Semiconductor Industry Association says support from New York State is expected.
The industry consortium — known as Nanoelectronics Research Corp., or NERC — and NSF also announced supplemental grants for nanoelectronics research during fiscal year 2006 at five existing NSF nanoscience centers: 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 (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.; International Business Machines Corp.; Intel Corp.; Micron Technology, Inc.; and Texas Instruments, Inc.) will assign researchers to collaborate with the university teams.
– David Forman