Nontechnical Abstract: The society is experiencing an unprecedented growth of its digital footprint—be it in the form of uploading a photo on Facebook or live-streaming a teaching module to a massive global audience in YouTube or commandeering a revolution via Twitter. This convenience of modern computing, however, comes with a steep cost in terms of energy use and environmental impact: today, the global information infrastructure, i.e., data centers, emit as much greenhouse gases as that of the state of Nevada or a country such as Netherlands or Malaysia and constitute around 1% of world-wide electricity demand. According to scientific estimates, this fraction may balloon up to 20% in the next 15-20 years. At the core of this predicament lies the fact that our cutting-edge digital hardware has long been overdue for a prime upgrade in terms of their energy efficiencies—at the level of its most fundamental, building blocks: the transistors. The proposed research aims to explore an energy-efficient transistor concept - negative capacitance field-effect transistor, which will be made using a new class of nanometer-scale materials, called the antiferroelectric oxides.
The project aims at addressing the generational, global challenge of energy efficiency of information processing electronics by exploring an energy-efficient transistor concept, namely the negative capacitance field-effect transistor (NCFET). The main claim of innovation is the use of a new class of nanometer-scale materials, called the antiferroelectric oxides, to enable this transistor technology. The underlying hypothesis is that owing to a unique physical phenomenon in antiferroelectrics: the electric field-induced non-polar-to-polar phase transition, antiferroelectric NCFETs can lead to a reduction of the energy in transistors below the fundamental, thermodynamic limit, much more than that is allowable in their conventional counterparts: ferroelectric based NCFETs. Tightly integrated with these research activities is a 5-year plan to pilot sustainable, all-level educational curricula that is scalable to the state and the national levels for creating a steady pipeline of domestic semiconductor workforce. Proposed pre-college activities include increasing awareness and excitement for semiconductor related topics in high-school classrooms through hands-on, outreach activities and teacher training via partnership with local schools. For higher-level education, the project will undertake formal and scholarly studies to understand the efficacy of different pedagogical techniques, such as online, remote and hybrid mode of teaching, in the new socio-economic realities of the post-pandemic world for undergraduate and graduate semiconductor courses.
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.
