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Electronics

Semiconductors

Projects/Programs

Displaying 26 - 50 of 103
Graph showing that this program enables the crucial inclusion of circuit functionality at cryogenic temperatures to enable scaling of quantum computation to meaningful levels.

Electronics for Cryogenic Environments

Ongoing
The operation of electronics optimized for room temperature applications in cryogenic environments introduces a remarkable number of physical and engineering hurdles. It is unsurprising that devices and circuits designed for room temperature encounter shifts in their operation parameters in...
Blue rectangle with green line through it. Electron Solid Interaction Illustration.

Electron-Solid Interactions

Ongoing
A measuring instrument produces a signal that depends upon the value of the measurand. The value and its uncertainty are inferred from the signal by using a model of their relationship. Erroneous models lead to erroneous inference. The accuracy of SEM (scanning electron microscopy) is limited by...
Graph showing Power Electronics Device Maturity vs Metrology Investment. From R&D to Commercial it shows going from Analytical to Statistical. Bullet points on the right side of the image read: Massively Parallel Reliability, Transient device (electrical), High-Temperature Hall, Advanced Electrical Test, FLTS/DLOS, Test Structure Design/Fab., Magnetic Resonance, Photoemission microscopy

Emerging Power Electronic Devices

Ongoing
The ongoing electrification of society has elevated the importance of electric transportation, renewable energy distribution, and data centers. It has also put new demands on the technologies -- called power electronics -- that control, interface, and transmit the electrical energy that powers our...
STM image of a 28-Si film deposited onto a Si/100 substrate

Enriched Silicon and Devices for Quantum Information

Ongoing
Enriching silicon from 5% to <1 ppm 29Si Groundbreaking work around the world has realized qubits in silicon using metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices, single atomic dopants/defects and SiGe heterostructures, and, in all cases, the qubit coherence and fidelity properties are improved when using...
Harnessing EUV capabilities for non-destructive metrology

EUV Scatterometry

Ongoing
To measure and inspect the smallest printed features on an IC chip, researchers and manufacturers use a combination of electron scanning modalities (i.e., transmission electron and scanning electron microscopies) and an optical method, scatterometry. Industrially, the most common modality for...
A time series of a MoS2 flake exposed to increasing time under electrical stress shows the growth of defects denoted with red and yellow areas over time. S= source and D = drain electrode.

Evaluation of 2D and WBG Material Quality Toward Device Reliability

Ongoing
Two-dimensional (2D) and wide band gap (WBG) materials are some of the latest materials classes having the potential to be transformative because of their high carrier mobilities, tunable bandgap, and atomic-scale film thicknesses. Unexpected degradation and failure in device performance is often...
extreme atom probe tomography illustration

Extreme Atom Probe Tomography

Ongoing
Sub-nanometer-resolved 3-D chemical mapping of any atom in any solid continues to be an imperative goal of materials research. If reduced to practice, it would have profound scientific, engineering, and economic impacts on U.S. industries collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Such...
Reflectance of two materials

Extreme ultraviolet optical constants

Ongoing
Measurements of EUV optical constants are often made by measuring the absorption or near-normal-incidence reflectivity, then performing transforms to obtain both the real and imaginary parts of the index. These sorts of measurements have considerable uncertainty because they require knowledge of...
Fundamental Electromagnetic Technologies and Standards

Fundamental Electromagnetic Technologies and Standards

Ongoing
This focus area develops theory, metrology, and standards for the technologies upon which the future of both wired and wireless communications depends. These developments are then leveraged to provide better measurement services to U.S. industry through extended frequency range, lowered uncertainty...

Fundamental Metrology for Communications

Ongoing
Engineers designing the next generation of wireless applications and devices must work around the fundamental issue of radio interference. NIST CTL’s RF Technology High Speed Electronics group focuses on fundamental measurement and modeling of nonlinear microwave systems, devices and materials that...
Electron microscopy images

GaN Nanowire Growth

Ongoing
Selective epitaxy: We have demonstrated that the diameter and placement of nanowires can be controlled by using silicon nitride (SiNx) masks on top of MBE-grown buffer layers (see figure). With electron beam lithography, several patterns with 3 mm die size that provide over 100,000 controlled...
nanowires

GaN Nanowire Metrology and Applications

Ongoing
GaN Nanowire LEDs: Our selective epitaxy methods and dopant characterization techniques have enabled fabrication of arrays of nanowire LEDs with controlled location and spatial layout. This development is complemented by modeling of the carrier flow and recombination. These LEDs were combined to...
Diagram showing the electro-thermo-mechanical relations in a crystal

Genomics of Electronic Materials

Ongoing
We approach this multidimensional characterization problem by developing measurement-based techniques to rapidly quantify all of the relevant properties of thin-film materials, interfaces, and microelectronic structures. We make extensive use of finite-element simulations, as well as linear and non...
Microscope image of a crossbar array

Hardware Accelerators for Neural Networks

Ongoing
One promising candidate for building a hardware accelerator comes from the field of spintronics, where information is carried by electronic spin rather than charge. Magnetic tunnel junctions are particularly suited because of their multifunctionality and compatibility with standard integrated...
Temporal Chip

Hardware Accelerators for Statistical Computing

Ongoing
Finding good solutions to many hard problems, like combinatorial optimization and traveling salesman problems, counterintuitively requires making the estimated solution worse before making it better. This situation results from many hard problems having many “solutions” that cannot be improved...
Today, device performance needs to be evaluated to determine success of materials development. This project will advance metrology for magnetic materials and develop models to predict device performance.

High Speed Metrology for Magnetoelectronic Devices and Models

Ongoing
The U.S. Semiconductor industry is integrating ferromagnet-based microelectronic devices such as magnetic RAM (MRAM) into existing silicon-based technologies. MRAM has much shorter write times and higher write endurance than the embedded Flash currently used. These properties makes MRAM highly...

High-Frequency Electronics

Ongoing
This project supports the metrology of advanced electronic circuits and systems through many activities centered around accurate measurements and characterizations, improving device models and designs, enabling traceability of complicated electronics systems, and incorporating advanced technologies...
Small array of transistors designed for single device integration.

Integrated CMOS Testbeds for Nanoelectronics and Machine Learning

Ongoing
The increasingly complex device requirements for next-generation computing architectures such as neuromorphic computing or nanoelectronic machine learning accelerators present challenges for researchers across the spectrum of institutions, from small businesses and universities to government...
Crossbar Memory Arrays

Integrated Testbeds for Advanced Metrology

Ongoing
Crossbar Memory Arrays An especially prolific structure in memory architectures aimed at accelerating neural network operation is the crossbar array (Fig. 1). We produce medium-scale arrays that hold up to 20,000 nanodevices which can be characterized, read from, and written to individually or in...

Light-matter interactions in Semiconductor Nanostructures

Ongoing
We investigate the interaction of light with semiconductor-based nanostructures. We extend concepts of entanglement and coherence in atomic physics to our solid-state systems. Our devices are based on semiconductors, like GaAs. We use InAs quantum dots (QDs) in GaAs as artificial atoms; they have...

Magnetic Random Access Memory

Ongoing
Focus areas include (1) the fundamental understanding of the interactions between spin and magnetic materials and materials with large spin-orbit scattering; (2) the nonlinear dynamics of both individual and interacting nanoscale magnetic systems; and (3) the role of thermal noise in nanomagnetic...
Custom-built wafer level probes in position to perform EDMR measurements on fully processed transistors.

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Ongoing
Custom-built wafer level probes in position to perform EDMR measurements on fully processed transistors. Electronics are all around us and have completely reinvented nearly every aspect of our society. Virtually any system, large or small, contains some type of electronics that may or may not be...
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