UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today (Sept. 4) that it will continue to support Penn State’s Center for Three-Dimensional Ferroelectric Microelectronics Manufacturing (3DFeM) as an Energy Frontier Research Center.
The DOE-funded center, led by Susan Trolier-McKinstry, Penn State’s Evan Pugh University Professor and Flaschen Professor of Ceramic Science and Engineering, maintains the best and most complete set of facilities in the world for the deposition, characterization and integration of ferroelectric materials — materials that are useful in applications such as memory storage devices, capacitors and sensors because of their ability to maintain polarization even after an external field is removed.
The new $14,525,000 award from the DOE marks the fifth year of funding for the 3DFeM center, which involves a multi-university team led by Penn State scientists. The center is a multi-institution team which also includes researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, The University of Notre Dame, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, University of Tennessee – Knoxville and University of Virginia, in partnership with Sandia National Labs, Brookhaven National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab.
“The DOE support is essential to bring together a large diverse team of researcher to tackle a difficult problem: how to develop the manufacturing processes that will bring a new family of materials into microelectronics foundries,” Trolier-McKinstry said. “Our team is combining new materials with advances in 3D architecture to overcome current limitations and significantly lower the energy burden associated with computing.”
Trolier-McKinstry and her team are working on introducing a memory element that does not require power to store data. They are working to develop the fundamental manufacturing science that assists the semiconductor transition to Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an era of connectivity and advanced-manufacturing that will require integrating robust ferroelectric materials that show outstanding properties throughout the device’s lifetime, Trolier-McKinstry explained.
In addition, the team is working to stack components vertically, which is needed for the next generation of computing and artificial intelligence.
Their approach is designed to bypasses the traditional storage limits of 2D microelectronics — a problem known as Moore's Law — and increase the efficiency of moving data back and forth between memory and logic, a problem known as the von Neumann bottleneck. The team is also working with ferroelectric materials to combine memory and processing directly on the same chip, rather than separating them as traditional computers do.
In total, the DOE announced funding for 10 Energy Frontier Research Centers in nine states, designed to bring together teams of scientists to advanced fundamental research. The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Energy Frontier Research Centers.
The funding supports three new and five continuing four-year awards, including the one to center led by Penn State researchers, and two two-year transition awards.
“Fundamental research in the areas covered in these awards is critical for generating foundational knowledge that underpins technologies that are important for DOE and the nation,” said Harriet Kung, acting director of the DOE Office of Science, in a news release. “Strengthening our understanding of the chemistry and materials science behind advanced manufacturing of polymers, microelectronics and quantum technologies will foster a cleaner and more energy-efficient future.”