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

随着半导体工业达到晶体管尺寸的极限，以及在越来越小的空间内可以使用多少功率，对新技术的需求非常迫切。本项目将通过开发新颖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带来更快更好的电子产品，比目前的方法使用更少的能量。这些进步将利用磁电的不寻常的磁性，这是一种将磁性和电压结合在一起的特殊材料。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产品。非易失性是指信息一旦写入，即使长时间断电也能恢复的特性。这种情况的一个例子是计算机的关闭。配备这种“即时接通”电路的计算机在电源故障时将重新启动到准确的状态。非易失性还将通过使电子设备在更小的电池上运行更长的时间而减少充电需求，从而节省能源。随着能源成本更低的新型电子产品的出现，降低消费电子产品的能源成本也可能导致全球范围内的一些能源节约。该项目开发了新颖的设备概念，极大地扩展了节能计算的实际限制，主要关注磁电材料，使界面磁性可以通过电压可逆地切换。这种通过电压写入磁性信息的方法将显著降低能耗，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，新概念必须考虑到小型化、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，新设备将能够在高于室温的温度下反复运行。通过在每个设备中利用更多的电荷，这些新设备将比一个简单的晶体管具有更多的功能，这反过来又将为超越现有技术的电路思想的发展提供新的机会。随着这个研究项目的发展，这些想法也将被探索。

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.