Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will lead a multi-institution project focused on transforming how chips are designed and manufactured and will explore how to fabricate chips that are more energy efficient and able to operate in extreme environments, in particular those with high levels of radiation.
The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and Sandia National Laboratories are all partnering with LANL on NSOC. The laboratory said the project would help lay the groundwork for “understanding and mitigating radiation effects to meet rigorous requirements for space, defense, and nuclear-security applications.”
“This project aims to solve a key issue in electronics, that due to a dependency on electrons as information carriers, integrated circuits are reaching limits in bandwidth density, speed, and distances,” said Hollingsworth. “The complexity required to accommodate improvements on integrated circuits means as much as 30 miles of wires shuttling electrical data across 10 or more different levels of a chip, all produced by increasingly inefficient manufacturing processes.”
