IUCRC Phase I: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC): Center for Advanced Semiconductor Chips with Accelerated Performance (ASAP)

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This Phase I award supports the Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Semiconductor Chips with Accelerated Performance (ASAP) at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. Integrated circuits or “chips”, containing billions of transistors within the size of a fingernail, have had a profound impact on human lives, and enabled many fundamental scientific discoveries. However, in state-of-the-art microprocessors and associated computing machines, interconnects or wires that transport data between different components start to dominate the overall power consumption and performance, which has become a critical bottleneck for future semiconductor technologies. In alliance with industry members, the Center will develop breakthrough solutions that alleviate interconnect challenges and improve the energy efficiency of next-generation information-processing systems. The Center will address the critical national need for US technology supremacy in future microelectronics. In addition to technology development, the center will foster unique training opportunities for a diverse workforce with technical competence, socially responsible leadership, and entrepreneurship. The Center has a rich portfolio of outreach activities, including working with under-represented and low-income K-12 students, training students from two-year institutions of higher education (community colleges/technical colleges), and developing a women-in-microelectronics program. The Center will work closely with UIUC’s Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access to recruit, educate, and retain diverse talents and empower them to become future leaders in US-based microelectronics and other related industries.The Center’s research is structured into three tightly integrated themes including materials discovery for electrical and optical interconnects, heterogeneous 3D integration, and highly energy-efficient circuits and architectures. The materials-to-architectures co-design approach will allow the Center to address the fundamental technological roadblocks toward enabling future microprocessors with higher performance but lower energy consumption. By integrating disparate components on silicon, such as interconnects based on quantum materials, nanodielectrics, magnetic and ferroelectric memory, nano-photonics, and III-V elements, the Center seeks to reduce the energy-delay cost of data communication hundred-fold in chips adopting novel processing-in-memory architectures. Center faculty members have cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, nanoscale electronic and photonic device fabrication and characterization, computational modeling, and circuit and architecture design. By focusing on technologies that are mutually beneficial for digital and RF applications, the Center will collaboratively address the research needs of its industrial members representing different microelectronics sectors and thus different research priorities. The Center will engage with semiconductor foundries, chip manufacturers, small startups, DOE national labs, and DoD labs and collaboratively seek to make a sustained and meaningful impact on the next-generation information-processing systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.