Nanotechnology, nanofabrication, materials, advanced packaging and manufacturing technologies

Integrated Circuits & Power Electronics: This area is concerned with the application-driven design of electronic circuits and systems, spanning a wide spectrum from low frequencies to mm-wave and THz. The research incorporates a variety of technologies, ranging from emerging nano and MEMS devices, nano-CMOS and BiCMOS processes, as well as discrete electronics for power conversion. The specific research thrusts include:

• Mixed-signal integrated circuit design (data converters, sensor interfaces, imaging and selected areas of bio-instrumentation);
• RF and mm-wave integrated circuit design (wideband communication systems, microwave and millimeter-wave imaging, phased arrays, integrated antennas);
• Power electronics (switch-mode power converters, resonant converters; switched mode RF power amplifiers passive component design, converters using SiC and GaN at 10s of MHz, high voltage supplies, wireless power transfer systems, pulsed power applications, high voltage supplies, wireless power transfer systems, pulsed power applications);
• Nanosystems (digital and analog circuits and systems) enabled by emerging nanotechnologies, including aspects of design methodology, validation and test, approximate computing, and robust circuits and systems;
• Silicon technology modeling both for digital and analog circuits, including optoelectronic/RF applications, bio-sensors and computer-aided bio-sensor design, wireless implantable sensors.

Energy-Efficient Hardware Systems: The exponential growth in performance and storage capacity has been the key enabler for information technology for decades. However, the end of voltage scaling in semiconductor chips has made all computer systems, from mobile phones to massive data centers, energy limited. Moreover, new nanosystems enabled by emerging nanotechnologies provide unique opportunities for revolutionizing energy-efficient architectures through new transistor and memory technologies and their massive and fine-grained three-dimensional integration. These shifts motivate new system architectures and vertical co-design of hardware, system software, and applications. We look at new ways to design, architect, verify, and manage highly energy-efficient systems for emerging applications ranging from imaging and computer vision, machine learning, internet-of-things and big data analytics.

Examples include:

• Hardware design for specialized accelerators and programming models for heterogeneous computing;
• Scalable hardware verification and system validation;
• Scalable architectures with thousands of computing elements and massive memory capacity;
• Hardware architectures and systems software for cloud computing;
• Architectures for nanosystems enabled by emerging technologies;
• Robust and trustworthy architectures.