2016

Highlights

• The New Science Team (NST) sets a new direction for future programs with multiple government agencies. This resulted in the JUMP and nCORE programs as well as an SIA-SRC industry vision and guide for future semiconductor research opportunities.
• SRC welcomed Japanese based Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) and European based NXP. With the addition of NXP, SRC members now include five of the top ten semiconductor companies in the world.
• In 2016 SRC managed a total of 311 contracts, grants and agreements with 99 different universities and research organizations worldwide.
• All three NRI/NIST centers (INDEX, SWAN, and CNFD) are making good progress in the post-CMOS device concepts explored in each center. The negative refraction of electrons in graphene p-n junction discovered by INDEX researchers was recognized by Physics World as one of the top 10 breakthroughs in 2016. INDEX researchers have also improved the materials and efficiency of spin Hall effect for spin logic devices. SWAN researchers increased the negative differential resistance ratio of their interlayer tunnel FET by material and structure engineering, and reported promising epitaxy growth technique for 2D materials and topological insulators. CNFD researchers achieved lithographically patterned magnetoelectric and ferroelectric devices and demonstrated room-temperature spin wave propagation and detection in nanowire devices. The Benchmarking Center launched in 2015 has worked closely with all three NRI centers to improve the device benchmarking methodologies and also expanded benchmarking to non-Boolean circuits. In 2016, six new projects co-funded by NSF and NRI started in the E2CDA (Energy Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures) program, covering research in steep slope devices, nonvolatile memories, cognitive computing, machine learning, optoelectronics, etc.
• A third round of hardware security research and a new research effort focused on energy efficient computing were jointly initiated with NSF.
• The STARnet undergraduate research internship program increased its participation by +56% year-over-year