The Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics Focus Center may
have a large name, but what the researchers involved with FENA will
be dealing with is pretty small.
Kang Wang, electrical engineering professor and founder of the
UCLA Nanotechnology Facility, has been chosen to head the Focus
Center established in September to conduct research that will
sustain the United States semiconductor industry.
Semiconductors are electronic components found in many devices
such as computer processors.
Currently, the type of semiconductors used are Complementary
Metal Oxide Semiconductors, the majority of which are made of
silicon.
One of the major reasons for starting Focus Centers is the
approaching limit of semiconductor performance.
Roughly every 18 months, computer chips become twice as fast as
before, an observation known as Moore’s Law.
Within 10 to 20 years, it is estimated that the limit to
Moore’s Law will be reached, Wang said.
“Everyone is concerned,” he said. “If the
limit is reached, then innovation cannot continue.”
Though the limit of CMOS technology may seem to be in the
distant future, researchers must start now.
“From a research point of view, it’s a short amount
of time,” Wang said.
Researchers, however, may be able to beat the limit if they
design nanoscale semiconductors, which would allow manufacturers to
more densely pack semiconductors onto chips.
“We’re trying to incorporate nanoscale technologies
which are devices that have feature sizes as small as 10 or a
hundred atoms,” said math professor Russel Caflisch, also
involved with FENA.
FENA is an interdisciplinary program that will incorporate
various fields of knowledge into its research, including chemistry,
physics, material sciences, electrical engineering and even
biology, Wang said.
FENA is looking at inorganic and organic nanostructures as well
as biological molecules on a nanoscale, he said.
However, producing nanoscale semiconductors would involve
adopting different approaches to production.
Instead of shrinking semiconductors over time, molecules of
nanostructures will have to assemble themselves, Wang said.
“From the bottom-up approach, we would need to discover
the chemistry of self-assembly,” he said.
Researchers at FENA are also investigating the potential of
quantum information, Wang said. Instead of information being
expressed in binary, zeros and ones, it would be expressed in
“quantum bits” that cannot only be expressed as zeros
or ones, but combinations of the two.
In addition to expanding the capabilities of current
computational systems, researchers are also looking to the brain
for inspiration, which processes information differently from
computers, he said.
The Department of Defense and the Semiconductor Industry
Association, which includes members from corporations such as
Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments and AMD, are sponsoring the new Focus
Center.
UCLA is the site of the fifth Focus Center since the Focus
Center program was established in 1998 and the only one established
this year.
The university already has several facilities devoted to
nanotechnology research, including the California NanoSystems
Institute.
“(UCLA was chosen to house FENA) because of our strong
faculty working in nanoscience and nanotechnology and the presence
at UCLA of the California NanoSystems Institute,” said Vice
Chancellor of Research Roberto Peccei.
UCLA is collaborating with 10 other universities, including the
UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside.
Over the next three years, about $14 million will be allocated
to FENA.