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Notre Dame to lead microelectronics research center [South Bend Tribune, Ind.](South Bend Tribune (IN) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jan. 18--SOUTH BEND -- The University of Notre Dame will head a new microelectronics research center that will explore new ways to dramatically lower the power requirements of electronics. It will be called the Center for Low Energy Systems Technology -- or LEAST. The effort will be funded by $30 million over the next five years, with the grants provided by the Semiconductor Research Corp. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Notre Dame will be the lead institution for the center, which will involve researchers at Notre Dame and nine other universities: Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Penn State, University of California Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at Dallas. LEAST will research new material systems and new switching phenomena that can offer lower voltage operation for electronics. "Today's integrated circuits are limited by power dissipation. Anyone with a laptop feels the power dissipation as heat. In our data centers, this heat requires an extensive and costly cooling system which drains power from the grid," said Alan Seabaugh, a Notre Dame electrical engineering professor who will lead LEAST. The grant will provide $6 million annually for research at the partner schools, with Notre Dame receiving about $2 million each year. LEAST will build on research developed in the past five years by the Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery, a Notre Dame-led consortium created to discover and develop the next nanoscale logic device, the basic building block of smaller, faster computers of the future. ___ (c)2013 the South Bend Tribune (South Bend, Ind.) Visit the South Bend Tribune (South Bend, Ind.) at www.southbendtribune.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |