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.
