Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, who has joined the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), believes that the state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary research complex facilities planned for the new £55 million building, due to open in mid-2008, will allow him to carry out extensive research into nanotechnology.
"The new clean room under construction in the building, the high level of expertise available to me and the possibility of collaboration with other strong groups such as the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and academics in engineering science, physics and chemistry, will allow me to develop more hybrid devices and systems," he said.
Professor Mizuta made a major contribution to the field when he and his colleagues developed a high-speed single-electron memory and a new memory device called PLEDM TM (Phase-state Low Electron-number Drive Memory).
This is a single chip which enables instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information while consuming very little power, developed when he was a laboratory manager for Hitachi in Cambridge.
Top-down approach to nanoelectronics
At ECS, Professor Mizuta plans to combine the conventional top-down approach to silicon nanoelectronics with a bottom-up approach which will enable him to introduce atomically-controlled nanoscale building blocks such as nanodots, nanowires and nanotubes to make his unique nanodevices."We now need a paradigm shift from conventional ‘More Moore’ technology to ‘More than Moore’ and ‘Beyond CMOS’ technologies," he explained.
"I believe that if we adopt unique properties of well-controlled nanostructures and co-integration with other emerging technologies such as NEMS [nanoelectromechanical systems], nanophotonics [manipulation and emission of light using nanomaterials] and nanospintronics [devices that use the electron spin instead of the electron charge for electronics], we can develop extremely functional information processing devices, faster than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional ‘More Moore’ technologies."
More Moore is a 36-month project started early 2004 and funded by the European Commission that aims to resolve technical problems with Extreme Ultra Violet Lithography (EUVL) technology, which was chosen by the electronics industry to manufacture integrated circuits in 2010 and beyond.
It is named after Moore's Law, a principle determining that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 18 months.
However, this growth in microprocessing power, which has been constant for over 40 years, cannot continue indefinitely, and alternatives are being pursued to address this issue.
