Director: Huili (Grace) Xing
Assistant Director: Tomas Palacios

The SUPREME center will demonstrate the basic materials and technology breakthroughs needed to address the seismic shifts identified by the semiconductor community in the Decadal Plan for Semiconductors. SUPREME embraces the dichotomy of being materials-driven and application-centric. This is because the compute workloads of the future –at the cloud, the edge, and the end-devices – will be wildly diverse. Informed feedback loop back to materials discovery and device/interconnect design research based on application-level benchmarking will be necessary to optimize a given technology for maximum system-level impact for different applications. As such, our parallel top-down and the bottom-up approaches will merge at different levels of abstraction creating synergistic gains of at each level of abstractions, leading to 10 – 100× performance gains at the system-level.

To achieve this mission, SUPREME is structured around 4 themes: (1) Digital & Analog uses the unique properties of two-dimensional materials, wide and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors, and advanced ferroelectrics, in conjunction with their new physics to develop a new generation of Digital and Analog devices. Careful compact-modeling of these devices will allow quick assessment of system-level impact; special attention will be paid to thermal issues and management; (2) Memory and Applications presents new approaches for embedded and neuromorphic memories (i.e. ferroelectric, spintronic and electrochemical devices, and e-DRAM), and scalable NAND FLASH technologies (based on vertical TMD’s); (3) Interconnects and Metrology studies a variety of new materials (anisotropic conductors, topological semimetals, highly nonlinear and piezoelectric materials, 2D materials), processes, and devices to provide multifold improvements in the electrical interconnects in the sub-8 nm regime and in inter-die/chip optical interconnects. Material characterization and metrology required to serve the needs of interconnect research as well the needs of the research proposed in other Thrusts will also be performed in (3); (4) Materials Discovery and Processing develops the new materials and processing technologies required by the first three device-focused Thrusts.