SRC & DARPA invest $194 million on university R&D projects

The investments are a part of The Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research network (STARnet) program. “STARnet is a collaborative network of stellar university research centers whose goal is to enable the continued pace of growth of the microelectronics industry, unconstrained by the daunting list of fundamental physical limits that threaten,” said Gilroy Vandentop, the new SRC program executive director. The specific missions of the STARnet university research centers include: C-FAR at University of Michigan: Research future scalable computer systems architectures that maximally leverage emerging circuit fabrics to enable whole new commercial/defense application areas through a highly collaborative research agenda. Participating universities include: Columbia, Duke, Georgia Tech, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, Illinois, Washington and Virginia. C-SPIN at University of Minnesota: Bring together multi-disciplinary researchers in the area of spintronic materials, devices, circuits and architectures to explore and create the fundamental building blocks that allow revolutionary spin-based multi-functional, scalable memory devices and computational architectures to be realized. Participating universities include: UC Riverside, Cornell, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Alabama, Iowa, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn State, UC Santa Barbara, Michigan, Nebraska and Wisconsin. FAME at UCLA: Create and investigate new nonconventional atomic scale engineered materials and structures of multi-function oxides, metals and semiconductors to accelerate innovations in analog, logic and memory devices for revolutionary impact on the semiconductor and defense industries. Participating universities include: Columbia, Cornell, UC Berkeley, MIT, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, UC Irvine, Purdue, Rice, UC Riverside, North Carolina State, Caltech, Penn, West Virginia and Yale. LEAST at Notre Dame: Explore the physics of new materials and devices that can lead to disruptive advances in integrated circuits and systems, and focus on discovering the best material systems for ultralow voltage and steep transistors. Participating universities include: Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Purdue, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UT Austin and UT Dallas. SONIC at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Enable equivalent scaling in beyond-CMOS nanoscale fabrics by embracing their statistical attributes within statistical-inference-based applications, architectures and circuits to achieve unprecedented levels of robustness and energy efficiency. Participating universities include: UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Michigan, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon. TerraSwarm at UC Berkeley: Enable the simple, reliable and secure deployment of a multiplicity of advanced distributed sense-control-actuate applications on shared, massively distributed, heterogeneous and mostly uncoordinated swarm platforms through an open and universal systems architecture. Participating universities include: Michigan, Washington, UT Dallas, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Penn, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon and UC San Diego.