UVa to unveil nanotech research center Wednesday

Someone is going to discover silicon’s successor — something that makes faster, smaller, cheaper computer chips — and probably soon. And whoever does stands a good chance of dominating the chip industry for years to come.

So Jeff Welser, director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative, thinks it’d be nice if it happened somewhere in America.

To encourage such research, the University of Virginia will unveil a new research center today, one that NRI is helping to fund.

“We think it’s very important … that the U.S. focus particularly hard on this,” Welser said in an interview from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where he was on his way to Charlottesville.

The Virginia Nanoelectronics Center — ViNC, for short — will be a collaboration between UVa, the College of William & Mary and Old Dominion University. The universities also have been working closely with Micron Technology Inc., a chip-maker with a facility in Manassas. The new center will hunt for new materials from which to make chips.

“Basically, what we’re doing is looking at the replacement of technologies that are used in all computers today,” Jim Aylor, dean of engineering at UVa, said.

The researchers are hunting for “totally new materials, totally new technology, totally new architectures,” Wolf said.

UVa already had the Institute for Nanoscale and Quantum Scientific and Technological Advanced Research, but the new center will be looking for truly groundbreaking technology, officials said.

“This is an extension of stuff that we’ve already been doing, but I think this sort of allows us to focus on some of the … next-generation computing technologies,” Aylor said.

Officials said they expect the center’s research to center on the potential of various oxides, starting with an oxide of vanadium.

UVa professor Stu Wolf joked that he’d like to turn the focus of the semiconductor industry from Silicon Valley to “Oxide Hills.”

“It turns out under the right conditions … they change from being an insulator to being a conductor,” Welser said.

The center hopes to slowly bring other projects online and already has a few on the drawing board, Wolf said.

Wolf, a professor of engineering and physics, has worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the past and is currently working for the Department of Defense. He’ll take over the leadership of the center when he returns to the university in January, he said.

The center is being created with backing from the NRI, which is in turn funded by major semiconductor companies, including Micron, Intel and IBM.

“The idea is this is all precompetitive research that hopefully benefits all of us,” Welser said.

The center is also being funded by the state through a consortium aimed at promoting microelectronics and by each of the three participating schools. The starting funding works out to $1.7 million spread over two years. Projects at the center will receive funding from the National Science Foundation and DARPA.

Virginia Secretary of Technology Jim Duffey called the center a “model of research and development projects to come within the commonwealth” in a written statement.

Welser said NRI also favors starting such centers in areas it believes will be favorable to spinoffs such centers might create. The research sometimes leads to breakthroughs that aren’t what NRI is after but are still promising.

Wolf said the facility won’t result in the creation of any new buildings at UVa, though there will be a new atomic force microscopic, which lets researches see items in minute detail in terms of structure, and also in terms of magnetic and electronic properties.

Wilsdorf Hall, Aylor pointed out, is already constructed to be able to hold labs with high-performance measurement and fabrication technologies.