PRAC - Accelerating Nano-scale Transistor Innovation

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This award facilitates scientific research using the large new computational resource named Blue Waters scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators at Purdue University, the Blue Waters project team and vendor technical team.Chip design faces a crisis. The 40 year process of transistor downscaling has led to atomic-scale features, making devices subject to unavoidable manufacturing irregularities at the atomic scale and to heat densities comparable to a nuclear reactor. A new approach to design that embraces the atomistic, quantum mechanical nature of the constituent materials is necessary to develop more powerful yet low energy devices.Electronic device engineering and material science must meet at the atomic scale to design new switching concepts. This demands the solution of quantum non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in systems in excess of 100 million complex degrees of freedom. Computations of this magnitude have been impossible, due to the lack of sufficiently powerful computers. Petascale computing creates an opportunity to pursue a multi-scale design approach that fuses nano scale (atomic) to the macro scale (wire), which will make possible new kinds of device designs that were previously unimaginable. The team is developing a general-purpose simulation engine. It will model electron transport in realistically extended devices using fully quantum mechanical (QM) models in an atomistic material description containing millions of atoms. Designers will be able to directly address questions of quantization and spin, tunneling, phonon interactions, and heat generation.