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Projects/Programs

Displaying 76 - 98 of 98

Polymers for Next-Generation Lithography

Completed
We work closely with the semiconductor industry to develop and apply measurements with high-spatial and chemically-specific resolution to elucidate the critical materials properties and process kinetics at nanometer scales that are needed to advance next-generation photolithography, including both

Power Conditioning Systems for Renewables, Storage, and Microgrids

Ongoing
Objective: To establish standards and measurement methods, and test for smart grid and microgrid Power Conditioning Systems needed to transition from today’s low penetration of nondispatchable intermittent renewable energy sources to flexible grid operations that can actively adjust to varying grid

Precision Materials for Quantum Devices

Ongoing
MBE System Our fabrication system is composed of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) chambers that support the in-vacuum exchange of 75 mm wafers without exposure to air as seen in Figure 1. These chambers are: (1) a deposition chamber with electron gun deposition, UHV compatible sputter guns, in situ shadow

Prototyping Platforms for Emerging Technologies

Ongoing
Emerging technologies aim to overcome traditional memory limitations with higher density, lower power consumption, faster read/write speeds, better endurance, and lower cost [2]. Many new candidate memory elements are analog or stochastic, requiring new testing infrastructure, and the context of

Pushing the Limits of Measurement Accuracy in Atom Probe Mass Spectrometry

Ongoing
Isotopic Analysis for Isotopic Geochemistry, Nuclear Safety, and Materials Science : Atom probe tomography has a significant advantage over other forms of mass spectrometry, which typically have a combined efficiency < 5%, in terms of ionization and detection efficiency. Commercial atom probe

Reliability Metrologies for Advanced Electronic Interconnects

Completed
High-performance devices, such as microprocessors and memory chips, are typically composed of structures with strict dimensional tolerances and geometries and are made up of various materials, all in close proximity in a three-dimensional system. Material interactions lead to reliability issues such

Semiconductor Nanowire Metrology: Electronics, Photonics, and Sensors

Completed
One of the key issues hampering progress in semiconductor nanotechnology is the absence of standardized nanostructures. We address this need through the controlled fabrication and assembly of semiconductor nanowire test structures with well-defined properties. To achieve this, we have manufactured

Smart Grid System Testbed Facility

Completed
Objective: To develop an advanced multi-mode interacting measurement testbed to facilitate implementation, validation, and full characterization of smart grid interoperability standards and smart grid performance. What is the technical idea? An interacting multi-mode measurement and characterization

Spectroscopy and Application of Solid-State Quantum Centers

Ongoing
Quantum color centers in wide-bandgap semiconductors have spin and optical degrees of freedom, which can be leveraged for applications such as sensing and single-photon generation. In materials like diamond and silicon carbide, long spin lifetimes and quantum coherence times enable sensitive

Strain Measurement for Semiconductor Devices

Ongoing
Mechanical strain is hugely important to semiconductor devices and packages while also being difficult to measure accurately. Strain is engineered into CMOS channels to improve carrier mobility for higher performance at lower power but is also intrinsically present from manufacturing processes where

Strain Measurement for Semiconductor Devices and Packages

Ongoing
Strain is a critical parameter that influences both electrical and mechanical failures of devices, however, measuring strain in complex 3D geometries and vanishingly small feature sizes remains a challenge for manufacturers. Data provided by strain measurements can be used to validate computational

Sub-nanoscale electron microscopy of complex nanostructures

Ongoing
The properties of advance materials are becoming ever more reliant on the ability to manipulate their chemistry and structure at very fine length scales. For example, the relevant feature sizes in state-of-the-art transistors continue to decrease, even as the complexity of the architectures employed

Temporal Computing

Ongoing
In standard integrated circuits, information that is coded as ones and zeros is implemented by voltages on wires being high or low. The circuits consume energy during transitions between these voltages. Binary numbers have a voltage per bit so there are a lot of transitions each time a number

Theory and Modeling of Materials for Renewable Energy

Completed
Nanostructured materials offer potential benefits for a range of renewable energy applications that rely critically on interfaces for separating charges, including photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, and electrochemical energy storage. The use of nanostructures allows scientists and engineers to

Theory of the optical properties of materials

Ongoing
Around 1998, first-principles calculation of optical constants and dielectric response began to include excitonic effects. Beginning with simple, wide-gap insulators and semiconductors, the field has progressed to studying more complex materials, clusters, and so forth. In the area of core

Thin Film Electronics (Archived)

Completed
Today's electronics have reached a point where sheer computation power has yielded to combined form and function as the key driver of large consumer markets. The demand for portable and pervasive electronics with greater functionality promises significant changes over the next decades in how society

Training and optimization of hardware neural networks

Ongoing
The goal of this project is to develop a general method that can train many different types of neural networks, and to demonstrate and evaluate their performance on new emerging hardware. We aim to develop and demonstrate training on diverse hardware platforms, and in the presence of realistic noise

Transport Property Measurements for Semiconductors and Energy Materials

Ongoing
The properties of materials and interfaces that govern reliability, performance, and thermal transport in advanced microelectronic packages are not fully characterized or understood, especially at device length scales wherein properties may differ significantly from bulk or literature values

Ultrafast Spectroscopy to Advance Microelectronics

Ongoing
Continued advancement in microelectronics, including analog and digital electronics, power electronics, optics and photonics, and micromechanics for memory, processing, sensing, and communications as defined by the OSTP “National Strategy on Microelectronics Research,” requires knowledge of material

Universal Microscopy Standards

Ongoing
Microscopy standards that are available today have inadequate performance characteristics. As device linewidths decrease toward physical limits, the international roadmap of devices and systems (IRDS) has set uncertainty targets by the year 2025. This target is hard to hit, challenging the industry