Purdue Center Working to Speed Research in Nanoelectronics

The National Science Foundation and a consortium of companies seeking to accelerate nanoelectronics research announced they are providing $2 million to five university centers, including one based at Purdue University's Discovery Park.

The Purdue-based Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), created in 2002 with a five-year, $10.5 million NSF grant, will share the $2 million with four other centers:

• The Center for Nanoscopic Materials at the University of Virginia.

• The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

• The Center for Electronic Transport in Molecular Nanostructures at Columbia University.

• The Center for Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications at Harvard University.

The $2 million is coming from the NSF and the Nanoelectronics Research Corp., an industry consortium that is a subsidiary of the Semiconductor Industry Association, which is based in San Jose, Calif. The consortium is designed to provide a competitive advantage to its member companies by delivering technical talent and early research findings from universities.

The money will be used to help the NCN tackle a critical question related to the inevitable demise of Moore's Law, a general rule that is central to the evolution and success of the computer industry.

The rule states that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months, driving rapid progress in computers and telecommunications. Doubling the number of devices that can fit on a computer chip translates into a similar increase in performance. Because this doubling requires circuits to be made smaller and smaller, it is thought the limits of physics will soon make it impossible to continue at the same pace, or that it eventually will become too expensive to shrink circuits any more, hindering further progress.

Some observers have predicted Moore's Law will hit a brick wall in about a decade. At that point, conventional computer chips, called "CMOS," for complementary metal oxide semiconductor chips, will have to be replaced with a new technology.

"The big question in electronics today is: What lies beyond Moore's Law?" said Mark Lundstrom, NCN director and Purdue's Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

"This new funding is critical because it will enable us to expand our research team with four new students who will be dedicated to looking very specifically at the question of whether there is an electronic device that can replace or complement the CMOS transistor when Moore's Law ends. This is an especially exciting and important time, and we are pleased that NCN and Purdue have an opportunity to work with the NSF and the electronics industry to help define 21st century electronics."

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