EETimes.com - Russia to host next-generation tech symposium

NEW YORK — Russia's closer alliance with the West in the war against terrorism coincides with increased interest to collaborate on research and development in microelectronics. A symposium to be held Sept. 10-13 in Moscow, Nano and Giga Challenges in Microelectronics, is expected to draw some 500 researchers from around the globe, and will be co-sponsored by a major American semiconductor company for the first time.

Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector is a sponsor of the four-day conference, along with such diverse organizations as the European Office of Aerospace Research & Development — a detachment of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research — plus the Ohio Supercomputer Center and numerous Russian academic institutions and research firms.

Focused on materials and processes for advanced and future microelectronics, the conference will posit that next-generation technologies will only be possible with significant progress in physics, chemistry, material sciences and related disciplines of nanotechnology.

While microelectronics evolved successfully by tracking Moore's Law, organizers of the symposium contend that the next stages in performance, miniaturization and cost of nanometric-scale structures will require new materials, new photolithographic and semiconductor processing technologies, new devices and new design strategies.

The integration of billions of transistors on a chip present unprecedented technical challenges in their practical realization, as well as financial challenges which stem from the exploding cost of manufacturing facilities. Interdisciplinary cooperation is needed to help contain these costs.

Conference organizers are betting that Russia, with its strong education system, scientific tradition and underlying potential is positioned to make a significant contribution to solving these challenges.

This meeting will bring together scientists and engineers from academia, industry and national laboratories to discuss recent achievements and the potential for collaborative efforts in solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems in microelectronics.

Research highlights

Some of the highlights of scheduled presentations include:

A cooperative effort between researchers at the Kurchatov Institute (Moscow) and the IBM Research Center (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) will detail the use of selective atom removal for fabricating nanostructures with desirable electric, magnetic and optical properties.

Konstantin Likharev, professor of physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, will detail the prospects of using hybrid single-electron transistor/field-effect transistor (SET/FET) circuits in new architectures for advanced information processing, including self-evolving neuromorphic networks. He will also present several ideas for terabit memories and electrostatic data storage.

Scott Hector of Motorola's DigitalDNA Labs (Austin, Texas) will run down the lithography options at the 45-nanometer technology node where the minimum pattern pitch is 90 nm. He will discuss next-generation lithography options using a mask and imaging system; maskless lithography; and imprint lithography, or the immersion of a wafer in a high index fluid.

Tariel Makhviladze of Moscow-based Soft-Tec Ltd., a joint venture with Motorola, will relay the 10-year collaboration between industry, the Russian Academy of Science, and Russian university students, who undertook more than 20 challenging projects involving process and device modeling and simulation. He will outline several projects and their practical application.

Alexei Nikolaev will highlight the experiences of Samsung Electronics' technology cooperation with Russian partners. Nikolaev, of Samsung's Moscow office, will detail the company's R&D strategy when it established cooperative arrangements with universities in the United States, Japan, China, Russia and other countries. In Russia, the Samsung Research Center coordinates and monitors the cooperation between the research departments of the Samsung Group and Russian research centers and developers. Those partners include the Russian Academy of Sciences, universities, state research centers, branch institutions, private R&D companies and developers.

Gabril M. Crean of Ireland's National Microelectronics Research Center will detail how international research cooperation can exploit new technologies that are compatible with mainstream microelectronics fabrication methods. This environment poses new challenges for research centers active in information and communication technologies, which must explore new micro and nanotechnologies, photonics, and increasingly, methods and applications from the life sciences to remain competitive on a world stage.

In his presentation, Crean will offer strategies for developing a research portfolio from an increasingly diverse research landscape. He expects to cite specific examples of research collaborations with industrial partners through European Union research programs to highlight how strategic research goals can be achieved in collaboration with industry. The ability of research centers to contribute through spin-out companies and technology licensing will be buttressed with specific examples in the areas of photonics and nanotechnology.