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Penn State Researchers Part of $194 Million National Semiconductor Research Effort

13 March 2013

A group of Penn State researchers are part of a five-year, $194 million research effort recently announced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to support continued growth and leadership in the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Dubbed the Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research network (STARnet), the initiative involves six new university microelectronics research centers around the country,
including:

  • the Center for Future Architectures Research at the University of Michigan;
  • the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN) at the University of Minnesota;
  • the Center for Function Accelerated nanoMaterial Engineering at the University of
    California, Los Angeles;
  • the Center for Low Energy Systems Technology (LEAST) at the University of Notre
    Dame;
  • the Center for Systems on Nanoscale Information FabriCs at the University of Illinois at
    Urbana Champaign; and
  • the TerraSwarm Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Each of these six centers is composed of several university teams jointly working toward a single goal: knocking down the barriers that limit the future of electronics," said Jeffrey Rogers, DARPA program manager, in a release.

Penn State faculty members will be collaborating with researchers at the LEAST and CSPIN. The research work at Penn State will total approximately $4.93 million over five years. Suman Datta, professor of electrical engineering, is the principal investigator (PI) of the University’s effort with the LEAST. Theresa Mayer, distinguished professor of electrical engineering; Vijay Narayanan, professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering; and Joshua Robinson, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, are co-PIs.

The LEAST work centers on low power electronics, specifically nonconventional materials and quantum-engineered devices and projects implementation in novel integrated circuits and computing architectures.

Datta will head an effort on quantum-engineered steep transistors and Narayanan will lead research on benchmarks, circuits and architectures.

Nitin Samarth, head of physics, is the PI for the Penn State collaboration with C-SPIN. The center will focus on magnetic materials, spin transport, novel spin-transport materials,
spintronic devices, circuits and novel architectures.

According to DARPA, electron spin-based memory and computation may help overcome
the power, performance and architectural constraints of conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS). CMOS technology is used in building integrated circuits for computer processors and other electronics.

The entire STARnet effort includes 145 research faculty and about 400 graduate students across 39 universities.

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