The Sixth U.S.-Korea Forum on Nanotechnology:
Nanoelectronics and its Integration with Applications


Las Vegas, U.S., April 28-29, 2009


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M.S. Jhon (U.S.A.)
Carnegie Mellon University
mj3a@andrew.cmu.edu

J.W. Lee (Korea)
The National Program for Tera-level Nanodevices
jwlee@nanotech.re.kr

Recommendations of the Sixth U.S.-Korea Forum on Nanotechnology: Nanoelectronics & its Integration with Applications

Adopted on April 29, 2009

During the past decade, Korea and the United States have been supporting nanotechnology as a priority research area. The delegates at the 5th meeting of the Korea-U.S. Joint Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (held on October 30th & 31st, 2002 in Seoul, Korea) agreed that establishment of a Korea-U.S. Forum on Nanotechnology would be beneficial to promote and enhance  research collaborations in the field of nanotechnology among scientists and engineers from both countries. Specifically, a joint Forum between Korea and U.S.will facilitate networking between the research communities and agencies of both countries, enabling each side to exchange information and explore opportunities for cooperative efforts. With this mission, we organized the first Korea-U.S. Forum on Nanotechnology, via National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, at Seoul, Korea during October 14-18th, 2003. As the Korean counterpart to NSF, participation was overseen and funded by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST). The first Forum was attended by 250 participants from both countries and covered a broad range of nano-research areas. The second Forum, held in Los Angeles from February 17-19th, 2005, was a topical meeting that focused on nano-manufacturing and educational program development on nanotechnology. The Forum was attended by 32 experts. The third Forum, held in Seoul on April 3rd & 4th, 2006, focused on two areas: (i) active devices and systems research in nanotechnology, and (ii) environmental, health, and safety (EHS) implications of nanotechnology. This Forum was attended by 150 participants from both countries. The fourth Forum, held on April 26th & 27th, 2007 in Honolulu, HI, investigated the sustainable nano-energy area dealing with the design, synthesis, fabrication, and characterization of nano-materials as well as devices and systems for energy applications such as fuel cells, batteries, hydrogen storage & production, and solar cells. The Forum was attended by 36 experts. The fifth Forum dealt with the emerging area of nano-biotechnology focusing on nano-biomaterials, instrumentation technologies, and integrated systems for overcoming critical challenges in biomedicine and delivery of healthcare as well as their EHS and toxicity issues. This Forum was held in Jeju-do, Korea on April 17th & 18th, 2008, and attended by 44 experts.

This sixth Forum held at Las Vegas on April 28th & 29th, attended by 39 scientists, dealt with the emerging area of nano-electronics with emphasis on fundamentals as well as integration with applications including fusion technology with bio- and sustainable energy- areas.

The following are the general recommendations of this Forum to ensure the partnership between these two countries for the continued success of nano-electronics research:

(1) The Forum and the follow-up activities will continuously provide a common platform for researchers at all levels in both countries to share experiences and expertise to enhance partnership in the field of nanotechnology.  Facilitating interactions between industry and academia within the areas of interest are recommended. Especially, there is a strong need in collaborations and interactions to keep student interests in mind – research together with potential for employment. There should be more industrial involvement in the meeting.

(2) These annual Forums aim participation from leading researchers to early-career researchers including pre-tenured faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students. Enhancing the visibility and expanding the reach of the exchange programs is also recommended. Forum’s biggest impact would happen through bringing together of younger, pre-tenure or just-tenured, faculty. The meeting should be a forum for broader mentoring of younger faculty by diverse senior faculty and industrial participants.

(3) We recommend to address nanosystems, or nanostructures, which incorporate molecular and/or biological entities as well as alternative energy, information technology, nano-informatics, nano-sensors, and distributed systems integration by design advances in computational techniques need to be moved to real-life systems with multi-scale approaches.

(4) Support to allow/require the movement of students and early-career scientists between the collaborative partners. Intellectual property (IP) problems need to be addressed and resolved.

(5) We recommend fostering more collaboration and participation, holding the meetings at major universities and research centers.

The followings are the recommendations of this Forum presented in two groups:

Group 1 (More Moore, Beyond CMOS)

General recommendations:

Industry-Academia interests:

In United States and in Korea, there are different perspectives and interests between industrial and academic interest. There is need in collaborations and interactions to keep student interests in mind – research together with potential for employment.

There should be larger industrial involvement in the meeting.
  • Need increased participants from broader community that include related – applied mathematicians and applied physicists.

  • Forum’s highest impact would happen through bringing together of younger, pre-tenure or just-tenured, faculty. The meeting should be a forum for broader mentoring of younger faculty by diverse senior faculty and industry participants.

Forum Subjects:

  • Broaden and make them farther out so that they have longer term outlook and look for fundamental understanding that is not competitive in industrial sense:
    o Alternative energy
    o Alternatives in information technology, and bio related nano-informatics
    o Nano-sensors and distributed systems integration

Forum Location:

  • Foster more collaboration and participation, hold the meetings at major universities of the subject and major research centers.

Collaborations:

  • Assess past accomplishments – sabbatical leaves, student impact, Korea-U.S. interactions with individuals.

  • One suggestion for fostering collaboration and making it tractable is a call  for ¾ page document from participants defining a collaboration that would be fruitful as a result of this workshop. Forum should be a source that fosters this collaboration and make it happen.

Specific Recommendations:

  • Spintronics:

o Find ways to scale it to 20 nm and low power

  • Spin Transistors:

o Input – output mechanism that is very low overhead in the use of spin processing

o High S/N and raise temperature of operation

  • CMOS+ and others

o Find the limits of new phenomena and structures: electromechanical, tunneling, and new channel materials

o New approaches for sensing

  • New Approaches

o Fundamental understanding of multifunctional materials – multiferroics, phase transition, complex oxides, and their use in devices

o Fundamental understanding of exciton based processing

o Find the right application for the fundamental phenomena – single electron charge and transistor in memory and converters, single flux quantum

  • Quantum Computing

o Keep it as fundamental research

  • Non-traditional Information Processing

o Probabilistic and inexact approaches for computing

o New architectures that tackle the disconnect between nanodevices and their use at system scale

Group 2 (More than Moore and other issues)

Premise:  The end of Moore’s law is near, regardless of what evolutionary changes are done in the next few years.  The problem with VLSI is that it has remained a von Neumann architecture, and radical new technologies will not arise from the evolutionary changes that are being discussed.

What is needed are revolutionary changes in integrated systems.  This means changing either the architecture or the device, or both.  There are some problems:

  • The biggest problem is quite general: “if it is not on the roadmap, it is not interesting to the industry.”  What is needed is “curiosity-driven” research into novel new concepts for systems—architectures and devices.  We should not be industrially driven, rather we should be seeking “what is possible.”

  • The lack of funding for curiosity-driven research in the U.S.has allowed leadership to move abroad.  This fact also means that other countries can seize the opportunity to advance new science breakthroughs.

Revolutionary approaches must occur at both the architecture/system and device levels.  There are also general guidelines to pursue novel systems:

  • Nanowires offer the advantage of putting transistors in upper layers in order to pursue non-von Neumann architectures, including reconfigurable architectures.  Primary concepts may well be biologically inspired.

  • We need to have multi-disciplinary efforts to speed future advances (recognizing that these often have communication problems).

  • We need to address nanosystems, or nanostructures, which can incorporate molecular and/or biological entities by design.  These can incorporate biologically-inspired architectures.

  • Advances in computational techniques/approaches need to be moved to larger systems with multi-scale approaches.  This requires new algorithms and new physics/chemistry approaches.

  • Funding programs need to have long enough lifetimes to provide the time necessary to both learn the different “languages” and actually seed real multi-disciplinary approaches.

 

On behalf of the U.S participants

On behalf of the Korean participants

Myung S. Jhon, Professor
Carnegie
Mellon University
Pittsburgh
, PA, USA

Jo-Won Lee, Director
Tera-level Nanodevices
Seoul
, Korea