The SMART Center mission is to accelerate the development of beyond-CMOS building blocks with advanced spintronic materials and devices to create new pathways for exponential scaling across multiple generations. SMART is driven by the need for innovative memory and processing architectures that promise to significantly improve the energy efficiency, throughput, and overall functionality of tomorrow’s computing paradigms; in particular, neuromorphic computing, probabilistic computing, in-memory computing, and wave-based information processing.

The SMART research portfolio is organized around advanced spintronic materials research, but it has some overlap with all five Vectors of the nCORE program.

Research Vector 1: Novel Computing Paradigms Novel computing and storage paradigms, theory of operation, beyond conventional CMOS devices, beyond von Neumann architectures, and beyond classical information processing and sensing

Research Vector 2: Device, Interconnect, and Materials Research Fundamental material, device, and interconnect research to enable novel computing and storage paradigms

Research Vector 3: Advanced Manufacturing and Nanofabrication Advanced manufacturing and nanofabrication to enable the production of emerging devices and systems

Research Vector 4: Innovative Metrology and Characterization Innovative metrology and characterization to support basic device and material research, plus test platforms and standards to benchmark performance from device-level up to system-level

Research Vector 5: Computational Models Computational models to support basic research from emerging devices and materials to novel systems