PRAC - Accelerating Nano-scale Transistor Innovation

该奖项促进了科学研究使用大型新的计算资源命名为蓝色沃茨计划部署在伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校。它提供差旅费，以支持普渡大学的主要研究人员、蓝沃茨项目团队和供应商技术团队之间的技术协调。40年的晶体管缩小过程导致了原子尺度的特征，使得设备在原子尺度上不可避免地受到制造不规则性的影响，并且热密度与核反应堆相当。一种新的设计方法，包括原子，量子力学性质的组成材料是必要的，以开发更强大的低能量器件。电子器件工程和材料科学必须满足在原子尺度上设计新的开关概念。这就要求在超过1亿个复杂自由度的系统中解决量子非平衡统计力学。由于缺乏足够强大的计算机，这种规模的计算是不可能的。Petascale计算为追求多尺度设计方法创造了机会，将纳米尺度（原子）融合到宏观尺度（线），这将使以前无法想象的新型设备设计成为可能。该团队正在开发一个通用模拟引擎。它将在包含数百万个原子的原子材料描述中使用完全量子力学（QM）模型来模拟实际扩展设备中的电子传输。设计人员将能够直接解决量子化和自旋，隧穿，声子相互作用和热生成的问题。

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.