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

该第一阶段奖励支持伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校的工业大学加速性能先进半导体芯片合作研究中心（ASAP）。集成电路或“芯片”，包含数十亿个只有指甲大小的晶体管，对人类生活产生了深远的影响，并使许多基础科学发现成为可能。然而，在最先进的微处理器和相关的计算机器中，在不同组件之间传输数据的互连或电线开始主导整体功耗和性能，这已成为未来半导体技术的关键瓶颈。该中心将与业界成员合作，开发突破性的解决方案，缓解互连挑战，提高下一代信息处理系统的能源效率。该中心将解决美国未来微电子技术优势的关键国家需求。除了技术开发之外，该中心还将为具有技术能力、社会责任领导能力和企业家精神的多元化劳动力提供独特的培训机会。该中心有丰富的外联活动组合，包括与代表性不足和低收入的K-12学生合作，培训两年制高等教育机构（社区学院/技术学院）的学生，以及制定妇女参与微电子项目。该中心将与UIUC的包容、多样性、公平和准入研究所密切合作，招募、教育和留住不同的人才，并使他们成为美国微电子和其他相关行业的未来领导者。该中心的研究分为三个紧密集成的主题，包括电气和光学互连的材料发现，异构3D集成以及高能效电路和架构。材料到架构的协同设计方法将使该中心能够解决基本的技术障碍，使未来的微处理器具有更高的性能和更低的能耗。通过在硅上集成不同的组件，例如基于量子材料、纳米电介质、磁性和铁电存储器、纳米光子学和III-V元件的互连，该中心寻求在采用新型内存处理架构的芯片中将数据通信的能量延迟成本降低100倍。中心的教职员工在材料科学、纳米级电子和光子器件制造和表征、计算建模、电路和架构设计等领域拥有跨学科的专业知识。通过专注于对数字和射频应用互利的技术，中心将合作解决代表不同微电子部门的工业成员的研究需求，从而解决不同的研究重点。该中心将与半导体代工厂、芯片制造商、小型初创企业、美国能源部国家实验室和国防部实验室合作，共同寻求对下一代信息处理系统产生持续和有意义的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.