UC Santa Barbara and the Institute
of Microelectronics (IME) of Singapore have entered into a "green electronics"
research collaboration agreement focused on developing ultra-efficient nanoscale
transistors and exploring their circuit-level functionality. The collaboration
will be led by Dr. Kaustav Banerjee, professor of electrical and computer engineering
and an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE)
at UCSB, and by Dr. Navab Singh at IME.
This latest agreement reflects the global involvement of UCSB's IEE.
It falls specifically within
the Institute's Electronics and Photonics solutions group, one of six
key research areas for IEE.
More specifically, the collaborative research targets design, modeling, fabrication,
and
characterization of an emerging category of "green" nanoscale devices
with ultra-low leakage -
also known as "sub-kT/q" devices.
According to Professor Banerjee, achieving energy-efficiency by lowering leakage
power
consumption is of critical importance in all future electronic products, and
particularly in portable
electronic devices, in which increasing energy efficiency means increasing battery
life. The
UCSB-IME collaborative research aims to address this issue at the most fundamental
level, by
creating novel electronic devices whose switching behavior is near-ideal, that
is, they can move
from ON to OFF state and vice-versa almost instantly.
"We will be exploring new materials, transistor structures, fabrication
techniques, circuits, and architectures to achieve these goals," added
Dr. Singh of IME.
Banerjee's Nanoelectronics Research Lab at UCSB is renowned for modeling,
simulation and design of nanometer scale devices, interconnects, and circuits.
The Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore is a leading research institute
in the fabrication of advanced device structures "We expect that the synergies
in this collaboration will yield exciting discoveries that will have significant
implications for the worldwide semiconductor and electronics industries," added
Dr. Patrick Lo Guo-Qiang, Director of the Nano Electronics and Photonics programs
at IME.
Posted October 12th, 2009
