Nanotechnology research is wave of the future

Semiconductor integrated circuits have been the principal force
for economic growth during the past half-century. These circuits
have allowed for the creation of many important products such as
personal computers, cellular phones, the global positioning system,
medical instruments and many others.

According to Moore’s Law, this technology theoretically
allows us to double the speed of computer chips approximately every
18 months by making the feature size smaller and smaller. Within a
decade or two, however, this process may reach its scaling limit,
and the speed of computer chips will cease to increase.

UCLA has been chosen to be the site of a new multi-year,
multi-million dollar MARCO Functional Engineered Nano
Architectonics Focus Center (FENA), for the purpose of mastering
the building of nanoelectronics.

The Semiconductor Industry Association and the Department of
Defense are funding the center in an effort to study and build on
nanoscience and nanotechnology. Our interdisciplinary team will be
investigating fundamentally new ways of making integrated circuits
and systems based on new nano materials, devices and circuits.

New nanomaterials will be synthesized by chemists, materials
scientists and engineers on the atomic and molecular levels. They
will be modeled so as to achieve the goal of materials-by-design,
for which new properties can be controlled at will. These new
materials will be exploited for new molecular level devices for the
further advancement of information processing and
communications.

The effort will also explore entirely new methods of
“wiring” these nanodevices. We will investigate whether
the nanodevices should be wired or if they will be wirelessly
connected to form circuits very much like cellular phones are
connected ““ but by quantum waves instead of electromagnetic
waves.

If wirelessly connected, however, the devices will have the
ability to work in unison or in coherence. Contrary to
today’s technology in which all devices are connected in a
cascade and work in series, the future circuitry may work together
in parallel using quantum mechanics.

UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has been
long recognized as a leader in semiconductor research ““ the
school was among the first to establish a Nanoelectronics Facility
in 1989.

UCLA has a strong interdisciplinary team of faculty in
engineering and science working together in nanoscience and
nanotechnology, in particular with the recent establishment of the
California NanoSystems Institute. The academic research excellence
and the management team, as well as the established
infrastructures, led to the site selection of the center.

Wang is the director of the UCLA’s new Functional
Engineered Nano Architectonics Focus Center.