New ECS Professor To Develop Smaller, More Powerful Devices At Nanoscale

A new arrival at the University of Southampton will work on making smaller, more powerful computers and mobile phones a reality when the new Mountbatten Building opens next year.

Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, who has joined the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) believes that the state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary research complex facilities planned for the new £55 million University of Southampton Mountbatten Building, which is due to open in mid-2008, will allow him to carry out extensive research into nanotechnology.

‘The new £55 million clean room under construction in the building, the high level of expertise available to me and the possibility of collaboration with other strong groups such as the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and academics in engineering science, physics and chemistry, will allow me to develop more hybrid devices and systems,’ he said.

Professor Mizuta made a major contribution to the field when he and his colleagues developed a high-speed single-electron memory and a new memory device called PLEDM (Phase-state Low Electron-number Drive Memory), which is a single chip which enables instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information while consuming very little power, when he was a laboratory manager for Hitachi in Cambridge.

At ECS, Professor Mizuta plans to combine the conventional top-down approach to silicon nanoelectronics with a bottom-up approach which will enable him to introduce atomically-controlled nanoscale building blocks such as nanodots, nanowires and nanotubes to make his unique nanodevices.

‘We now need a paradigm shift from conventional ‘More Moore’ technology to ‘More than Moore’ and ‘Beyond CMOS’ technologies. I believe that if we adopt unique properties of well-controlled nanostructures and co-integration with other emerging technologies such as NEMS, nanophotonics and nanospintronics, we can develop extremely functional information processing devices, faster than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional ‘More Moore’ technologies,’ he said.