Microelectronics Science Research Centers to lead charge on next-generation designs and prototypes

(Press-News.org) RICHLAND, Wash.—Microelectronics run the modern world. Staying ahead of the development curve requires an investment that doesn’t just keep pace but sets new standards for the next generation of technological advances. Today, the Department of Energy announced the creation of three Microelectronics Science Research Centers to address the nation’s specific needs for microelectronics designed to operate in extreme environments such as high radiation, extreme cold, and high magnetic field—situations where robust and reliable operating environments are crucial. The new MSRCs not only focus on the next generation of microelectronics that power our communications, electric grid and data centers, but also do so with much greater energy efficiency.

The DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will lead three projects within the multi-institutional MSRCs and contribute to a fourth in support of these urgent national needs. 

“PNNL has established expertise and the cross-disciplinary acumen required to implement hardware-software co-design while meeting energy-efficiency challenges spanning traditional high-performance computing to edge computing, to integration of sensor data from DOE’s experimental user facilities,” said Karl Mueller, director of the program development office for physical and computational sciences at PNNL. “We are energized by the scope of this challenge and ready to roll up our sleeves and get started.”

The MSRCs will not duplicate industry efforts, but instead work alongside industry to bring specialized expertise, tools and equipment in areas often overlooked by the larger commercial microelectronics sector.

Three research areas will benefit from PNNL MSRC projects:

Self-Assembly of Tunable Molecular Memristors with Long-Range Order for Resilient and Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing

Motivated by the extraordinary information transmission and processing capabilities of the human brain, PNNL researchers will advance the predictive understanding of local and long-range intermolecular interactions necessary for the co-design of energy-efficient and robust resistance-switching memory devices, often called memristors. These advanced computing devices are known for high-speed operation and less energy consumption than traditional computing hardware. 

“We will leverage PNNL’s unique expertise and capabilities in controlled ion deposition, materials synthesis and characterizations, and multiscale simulations to enable the co-design of customized molecular memristors,” said PNNL’s Grant Johnson, the project director.

The team will harness and expand upon nature’s model by leveraging nanoscale bio-inspired materials to create artificial synapses for brain-inspired computing. This research is funded by the DOE’s Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences program.

“This project expands on our groundbreaking work in design and synthesis of biomimetic nanomaterials from sequence-defined peptoids—synthetic protein-like molecules that are more robust than natural building blocks, enabling the development of artificial synapses with controlled structure, chemistry and long-range order for integration into microelectronic devices,” added PNNL’s Chun-Long Chen, project manager and deputy director.

Accelerating Next-Generation EUV Lithography (ANGEL)

Each year, the amount of information encoded on semiconductor wafers has increased. But manufacturers are reaching a physical limit on how much can fit on each chip. Microelectronic manufacturers are now looking to use advanced photolithography to imprint ever smaller features on chips. PNNL researchers are moving to the next level of precision and control with extreme ultraviolet lithography. 

“We are focusing on enhancing the efficiency of extreme ultraviolet light laser-produced plasma photon sources and mitigating optics damage in harsh environments,” said principal investigator Sivanandan (Hari) Harilal. 

The team will explore the fundamental behavior of light operating in this extreme environment, with the goal of improving the efficiency of the light source and mitigating the degradation of materials in the extreme conditions encountered in the scanner. This research received support from the DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, and Fusion Energy Sciences programs.

Democratization of Co-design for Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Computing (DeCoDe)

Scientific computing has always had challenging requirements, and those requirements are often difficult to meet within an academic or non-commercial budget. The DeCoDe project aims to lower the cost and effort needed to enable a renaissance in computer architectures to meet the nation’s advanced computing needs. The team will apply its open-source capabilities to co-design hardware accelerators and supporting system software. By leveraging an open “chiplet” ecosystem, the team will integrate designs for energy-efficient analog and digital accelerators with commodity computing processors, memory modules, and other computing elements in a single package. The project is supported by the DOE Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

“In DeCoDe, we will integrate the outstanding work of our open hardware technology commons team with PNNL’s compiler framework-based hardware design tools to develop advanced designs for energy-efficient heterogeneous computing,” said Jim Ang, principal investigator of the DeCoDe project. “These designs will target CHIPS Act infrastructure investments for prototyping.”

In addition, PNNL will contribute computer architecture modeling expertise to another project, led by Brookhaven National Laboratory. El-Pho: Heterogeneously Integrated, Electro-Photonic, Reconfigurable Computing for Extreme Environments is aiming to develop an operating platform that integrates hardware and software design for computing and communications to support sensitive detectors in nuclear fusion and extreme cold cryogenic environments. 

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