Function Accelerated nanoMaterial Engineering Center

Function Accelerated nanoMaterial Engineering (FAME) aims to incorporate nonconventional materials and nanostructures with their quantum-level properties and physical understandings for enabling analog, logic and memory devices and for beyond Boolean computation. The Center's main focus is nonconventional materials solutions ranging from semiconductors, dielectrics and metallic materials as well as their correlated quantum properties. The mission of FAME is to create and investigate new nonconventional atomic scale engineered materials and structures of multi-function oxides, metals and semiconductors to accelerate innovations in analog, logic and memory devices for revolutionary impact on the semiconductor and defense industries.  » More

Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces and Novel Architectures

Spin-based memory and computation has the potential to overcome the power, performance and architectural constraints of conventional CMOS-based devices, but several barriers remain. The Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces and Novel Architectures (CSPIN) seeks to overcome these barriers by assembling experts in magnetic materials, spin transport, novel spin-transport materials, spintronic devices, circuits and novel architectures.  » More

Center for Low Energy Systems Technology

The mission of the Center for Low Energy Systems Technology (LEAST) is to explore the physics of new materials and devices that can lead to disruptive advances in integrated circuits and systems.

The Center focuses on field-controlled, low-voltage, steep-subthreshold devices and the exploration of solid-state phenomena to extend device performance to fundamental limits beyond heat removal. Steep-subthreshold, also called sub-Boltzmann devices, share the property that the voltage needed to change the current by an order of magnitude in the subthreshold region is less than 60 mV/decade. Benchmarking in the Semiconductor Research Corporation's (SRC) Nanoelectronic Research Initiative (NRI) has shown that the band-to-band tunnel field-effect transistor (TFET), a steep device that achieves its sub-Boltzmann behavior by energy filtering, is the leading option for a post-CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) switch.  » More

Center for Future Architectures Research

The Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR) is focused on computer systems architectures in the 2020-2030 decade. The key to sustained scalability in this time frame is successful innovation of application-driven architectures, especially those that can maximally leverage emerging circuit fabrics, such as 3D interconnect, novel memories and programmable logic. By 2020, the benefits of CMOS scaling will have been largely realized through many-core architectures. While there will be increased transistor density due to Moore's Law scaling beyond that timeframe, it will be difficult to derive power and speed improvements from Dennard scaling. Further, while post-CMOS devices may have emerged, they are unlikely to reach production in the early part of this transition decade. Countering these bottom-up technology challenges are top-down application opportunities. The dominating trend into the foreseeable future is that “big data” will get bigger across all platforms (sensor, mobile and server) and markets (commercial and defense) with commensurately increasing performance demands. This data, and associated resources, will be increasingly vulnerable to attacks; thus, security will emerge as a first-class architectural concern. The center's research agenda is guided by three initial technical vectors, whose intersections will help realize non-conventional architectures that address these pressing challenges.  » More

Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs

We believe that a drastic shift of the computation and communication model from a deterministic to a statistical foundation is needed. Such a rethinking would eliminate the need for an ideal Boolean switch and open the door for a wide variety of nanoscale device fabrics whose statistical characteristics can be exploited in information processing. This transition from the deterministic to a statistical framework requires a research agenda that incorporates critical elements of both systems and materials/devices, and hence spans the entire compute stack from application kernels to devices.

The Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) center will develop that fundamentally new information processing paradigm. SONIC will be guided by the following mission:

To enable equivalent scaling in beyond-CMOS nanoscale fabrics by embracing their statistical attributes within statistical-inference-based applications, architectures, and circuits, to achieve unprecedented levels of robustness and energy efficiency.  » More

TerraSwarm Research Center

The TerraSwarm Research Center (TerraSwarm) aims to enable the simple, reliable, and secure deployment of a multiplicity of advanced distributed sensecontrol-actuate applications on shared, massively distributed, heterogeneous, and mostly uncoordinated swarm platforms through an open and universal systems architecture.  » More