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Engineering New Paths at the Molecular Scale
The continued growth of the semiconductor industry—and the faster and more powerful electronic devices it supports—has long depended on engineers' ability to pack more and more transistors onto computer chips. But according to industry leaders, those chips are fast approaching the device scaling limits of what they can effectively handle.
And by 2020, the semiconductor industry could come to a standstill—unless a new electronics platform is created.
Enter the team of scientists at the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics, a collaboration of four California universities headquartered at UCLA's school of engineering. Their mission: to develop the technology to transform the industry.
According to Kos Galatsis, the Institute's chief operating officer, "Tweaking the existing platform, which was invented in 1963, may no longer work. We have to rethink semiconductors and devices from the ground up."
The potential solution? Using nanotechnology to create electronic components at the molecular scale.
Imagine laptop computers many times faster than any on the market today, yet a fraction of the weight. Or electronic devices capable of accessing and analyzing an entire lifetime of personal data. "Nanoelectronics could not only improve our daily lives through improved technology," says Galatsis, "it also could give an enormous boost to California's economy."
A New Research Model
So significant are nanoelectronics' potential benefits that the semiconductor industry has rushed in to advance the research. In fact, in an effort that Galatsis calls "rare and unique," the semiconductor industry approached UCLA and other universities directly with their shared, urgent need to create a new electronics platform. Rather than corporations conducting individual, competitive research in-house, they chose instead to join forces and to create a "distributed research model," utilizing existing infrastructure of several universities and working collaboratively with them.
"This new research model," says Galatsis, "allows our researchers to leverage the skills and resources of different campuses as well as companies."
The Intel Connection
Professor Kang Wang and his team.
Galatsis calls the relationship with Intel, a longtime research partner to UCLA, "highly collaborative." Beyond the funding and equipment donation, Intel has also provided human capital in the form of its own staff, including researchers, to work on campus for this project.
The potential benefits of such a partnership, Galatsis says, extend far beyond UCLA or any individual corporation. "In the same way the semiconductor industry gave us Silicon Valley," Galatsis says, "Southern California is poised to reap the economic benefits as the hub of a new electronics domain."
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| Professor Kang Wang directs The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics. |
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Central to the research being conducted at the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics is the work of renowned UCLA electrical engineering professor Kang Wang, who also serves as the Institute's director. His area of focus is called "spintronics," or magnetoelectronics, an emergent technology that exploits the propensity of electrons to spin as well as making use of their charge state. Traditional electronics relies on electrons moving through a wire. But electrons also have an "up" or "down" spin state, which can be used as a variable to encode information. "One resulting benefit," explains Wang, "is that spintronics reduces power dissipation, solving one of the central problems encountered with today's circuits. In addition, many 'spins' can be grouped together, providing greater stability in semiconductors." Do spintronics, and nanoelectronics in general, have a future? "The semiconductor industry is betting on it," says Galatsis. "Spintronics is very hot right now, and we can expect to see more and more companies coming to the table to advance it. This could be the wave of things to come."