The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics is being established with starting grants of $18.2 million: an industrial support total of $14.38 million and a matching $3.84 million UC Discovery Grant from the industry-university cooperative research program. The $18.2 million includes a $2.38 million NRI grant funded by Intel, IBM, Texas Instruments, AMD, Freescale and Micron. Intel will kick in an additional grant of $2 million, and a separate $10 million equipment grant.

The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics effort is expected to leverage what are now considered the best interdisciplinary talents in the field of nanoelectronics.

While the program's administrative center will be the UCLA Engineering school, scientific and technical responsibility will be spread across all four campuses. The program will be co-managed by the four participating campuses and the semiconductor industry sponsors, with nearly 10 researchers from the semiconductor companies working with students and faculty on all of the university campuses.

UCLA Engineering Professor Kang Wang will serve as the director of the Institute, working closely with professors David Awschalom at UCSB, Jeff Bokor at UC Berkeley and Philip Wong at Stanford.

"With this new institute, we are talking about an unprecedented opportunity to help define a technology that can exploit the idiosyncrasies of the quantum world to provide key improvements over existing technologies," Wang said. "As rapid progress in the miniaturization of semiconductor electronic devices leads toward chip features smaller than 65 nanometers in size, researchers have had to begin exploring new ways to make electronics more efficient. Simply put, today's devices, which are based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor standards, or CMOS, can't get much smaller and still function properly and effectively. That's where spintronics comes in."