Jonathan Bird
University at Buffalo, NY·Engineering
Computing's appetite for energy is growing faster than silicon transistors can efficiently serve it, and the spread of artificial intelligence workloads sharpens the problem. Every silicon transistor loses power each time it switches, and conventional memory forgets its contents when power is cut.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
magnetoelectric transistor
transition-metal dichalcogenides
2D semiconductors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Build non-volatile transistors that combine a voltage-switched magneto-electric gate with a channel made of transition-metal dichalcogenides, two-dimensional semiconductors only atoms thick, and show they retain their programmed state without power.
- Determine how proximity coupling between boundary magnetism in the magneto-electric gate stack and carrier transport in a high spin-orbit-coupling channel controls current, linking microscopic material properties to device behavior.
- Design and evaluate logic and memory circuits built from magneto-electric transistors, targeting fast, energy-efficient operation for data-intensive computation.
- Develop scalable routes to fabricating these CMOS-compatible devices at 300-mm wafer scale using the NY CREATES foundry, testing manufacturability rather than single demonstration devices.
More about the research
This project pursues a different kind of switch, built by combining two unusual classes of materials, so that logic and memory can be fast, low-power, and able to remember their state without electricity.
Why it matters
Data centers and AI hardware consume rapidly rising amounts of electricity, much of it lost in transistor switching and in memory that must be constantly refreshed. Transistors that switch magnetically at low voltage and keep their state when powered down could cut that energy cost. Building them on 300-mm foundry wafers addresses whether such devices could be manufactured at industrial scale, and the project also trains people for semiconductor careers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Wanyi Nie
University at Buffalo, NY·Materials Science
Grow and characterize heterostructures of chiral hybrid perovskites and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides to study interlayer excitons, electron–hole pairs spanning the interface.
Raisul Islam
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Fabricate and characterize the Diffusive Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistor (DFeFET), combining engineered drain contact metals with amorphous oxide semiconductor channels in a ferroelectric-gated transistor to obtain controllable volatile hysteresis in drain current-voltage curves.
Aaron Franklin
Duke University, NC·Engineering
Build an apparatus for nanoscale thermal mapping to measure how heat builds up and flows at metal contacts to 2D semiconductor transistors.
The school
University at Buffalo: 32 labs on PI Pages, $542M a year on research, 316 research doctorates a year.
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