II-New: RICARDO: Research Infrastructure for Circuit and Architecture Design with Emerging Technologies

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Aggressive technology scaling into the deep sub-micron (DSM) regime has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in transistor densities with shrinking transistor feature size that approaches the physical limits, resulting in major economic and technical challenges that are expected to hinder the continued scaling of traditional Complimentary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. This has resulted in the trends of searching for alternative emerging technologies that can continue the performance/power improvement for computing systems. As the underlying emerging technologies continue to evolve, it has become imperative for computer engineers to translate the potential of such emerging devices into circuits and architecture designs. Such new circuits and architecture designs will face multiple challenges ranging from the modeling/abstraction and simulation of such emerging technologies, to the complexity due to the sheer volume of nanodevices that will have to be integrated for complex functionality.The proposing team is exploring multiple emerging technologies (including three-dimensional integration, emerging non-volatile memory, and nanophotonics) with a comprehensive coverage of innovative work in the modeling, design analysis, simulation, verification, testing, and evaluation of circuits and architectures constructed out of emerging technologies, to overcome all the CMOS scaling limits. Efficient design and use of future system architectures using emerging technologies will be vital to the future of computing. The acquired equipment and the chip prototyping will be used to train graduate students and undergraduate students including those from under-represented groups advised by the PIs (women and minority students) to gain expertise in the area of computer architecture, Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI), and device fabrication. Teaching material and lab modules will be developed for several courses and made available on the web for wider dissemination. Ongoing collaborations with industry partners and national labs in current NSF-funded research will be used for transfer of technology.