E2CDA: Type I: Antiferromagnetic Magneto-electric Memory and Logic

随着半导体行业达到制造晶体管的极限，以及在越来越小的空间中可以使用多少功率，对新技术的需求非常迫切。该项目将通过开发新的存储器和逻辑器件来满足这一需求。学术界和半导体行业之间的持续互动将确保新的半导体器件概念能够导致更快、更好的电子产品，这些电子产品比目前的方法使用的能源要少得多。这些进展将利用磁电材料的不同寻常的磁性，磁电材料是将磁性和电压联系在一起的一种特殊类型的材料。这些设备的一个重要方面将是它们的非易失性，这一特性使它们成为新兴物联网的首选。非易失性是指信息一旦写入，即使长时间断电也可以恢复的特性。这种情况的一个例子是计算机关机。配备这种“即时开机”电路的计算机将在断电时重新启动到准确的状态。非易失性还将使电子产品在较小的电池上运行更长时间，而不需要充电，从而节省能源。随着新的能源价格更低的电子产品的问世，降低消费电子产品的能源成本也可以在全球范围内节省一些能源。该项目开发了新的设备概念，以极大地扩展节能计算的实用范围，主要集中在磁电材料上，使界面磁性能够通过电压进行可逆切换。这种通过电压写入磁信息的方法将导致能量消耗的显著降低，同时提高集成电路技术的计算速度。为了使基于这些设备的电子应用得以实现，新的概念必须允许小型化、大规模廉价制造和长工作寿命。就像传统的电子电路一样，为了确保可靠的运行，新设备将能够在远高于室温的情况下重复运行。通过利用每个设备中不仅仅是电荷，这些新设备将具有比简单晶体管更多的功能，这反过来将为超越现有技术的电路想法的发展提供新的机会？这些想法也将随着这项研究计划的发展而被探索。

There is a critical need for new technologies as the semiconductor industry reaches the limits of how small a transistor can be made and how much power can be used in an increasingly small space. This project will meet this need through the development of novel memory and logic devices. Continual interaction between academia and the semiconductor industry will ensure in new semiconductor device concepts that lead to faster and better electronics that use significantly less energy than current approaches. These advances will exploit the unusual magnetic properties of magnetoelectrics, a special class of materials that tie together magnetism and voltage. An important aspect of the devices will be their nonvolatility, a feature that makes them prime candidates for use in the emerging Internet of Things. Nonvolatility refers to the property that once written, information can be recovered, even if electrical power has been absent for an extended period. An example of such a situation is the shutdown of a computer. A computer equipped with this type of "instant on" circuitry will restart to the exact state when power failed. Nonvolatility will also lead to energy savings by enabling electronics to operate longer on smaller batteries with less need for recharge. Reducing the energy cost of consumer electronics could also lead to some world-wide energy savings, as new less energy expensive electronics become available.This project develops novel device concepts to greatly extend the practical limits of energy-efficient computation, focusing primarily on magnetoelectric materials, enabling interfacial magnetism to be reversibly switched by voltage. This approach to the writing of magnetic information via voltage will result in a significant reduction in energy consumption, while improving the computing speed of integrated circuit technologies. To enable electronic applications based on these devices to come to fruition, the new concepts must allow for miniaturization, inexpensive fabrication on a huge scale, and long working lifetimes. Just as for conventional electronic circuits, to ensure reliable operations, the new devices will be capable of operating repeatedly at well above room temperature. By exploiting more than just electrical charge in each device, these new devices will have more function than a simple transistor, which in turn, will present new opportunities for the development of circuit ideas that go beyond existing technologies ? ideas that will also be explored as this research program develops.