Oct 12 2009
UC Santa Barbara and the Institute of Microelectronics (IME) of Singapore have entered into a "green electronics" research collaboration agreement focused on developing ultra-efficient nanoscale transistors and exploring their circuit-level functionality. The collaboration will be led by Dr. Kaustav Banerjee, professor of electrical and computer engineering and an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) at UCSB, and by Dr. Navab Singh at IME.
This latest agreement reflects the global involvement of UCSB's IEE. It falls specifically within the Institute's Electronics and Photonics solutions group, one of six key research areas for IEE. More specifically, the collaborative research targets design, modeling, fabrication, and characterization of an emerging category of "green" nanoscale devices with ultra-low leakage - also known as "sub-kT/q" devices.
According to Professor Banerjee, achieving energy-efficiency by lowering leakage power consumption is of critical importance in all future electronic products, and particularly in portable electronic devices, in which increasing energy efficiency means increasing battery life. The UCSB-IME collaborative research aims to address this issue at the most fundamental level, by creating novel electronic devices whose switching behavior is near-ideal, that is, they can move from ON to OFF state and vice-versa almost instantly.
"We will be exploring new materials, transistor structures, fabrication techniques, circuits, and architectures to achieve these goals," added Dr. Singh of IME.
Banerjee's Nanoelectronics Research Lab at UCSB is renowned for modeling, simulation and design of nanometer scale devices, interconnects, and circuits. The Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore is a leading research institute in the fabrication of advanced device structures "We expect that the synergies in this collaboration will yield exciting discoveries that will have significant implications for the worldwide semiconductor and electronics industries," added Dr. Patrick Lo Guo-Qiang, Director of the Nano Electronics and Photonics programs at IME.