Friday, July 14, 2006

UC Santa Barbara To Lead Semiconductor Research Center

UC Santa Barbara is set to lead a new research center for advanced semiconductors, as a consortium of Universities was awarded over $7M in funding to look into improved CMOS speed and power technology. Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), a university-research consortium said this week that it has launched a new center to focus on developing and exploiting a new class of semiconductor materials, based on group III-V compound semiconductors. The research will be led by UC-Santa Barbara, and also includes teams from UC San Diego, Stanford, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Minnesota. The $7M funding is spread over three years. The research is expected to increase the speed of CMOS gates and lower power dissipation in circuits, with impact on chip manufacturing as early as 2012-2014. SRC is a research consortium backed by companies such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments, HP, and many other semiconductor firms.

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