JUMP 2.0 Consortium Targets Innovations in Microelectronics

JOEL WILLIAMS, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
joel.williams@photonics.com

Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), along with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and industry and academic stakeholders, has established the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). The SRC-led effort expands on the original JUMP collaboration, aimed at accelerating U.S. advancements in information and communications technologies. The consortium created under JUMP 2.0 will pursue high-risk, high-payoff research spanning seven thematically structured centers.

Each multidisciplinary center will focus on one overarching research theme identified as key to addressing emerging technical challenges. These defined interests, spurred by an increasingly connected world and a rapidly changing microelectronics landscape, will centralize long-term, pathfinding research aimed at breakthroughs applicable across defense and academia.

According to Adam Knapp, JUMP program manager, the program embeds liaisons from SRC’s corporate sponsors in the research centers themselves. Research will be guided toward areas of interest for industry and government through a continuous dialogue between industrial and academic representatives, Knapp said.

“All generated research, data, and code is independent of background IP and available to our sponsors in both industry and government pre-publication,” Knapp said in an email to Photonics Media.

Sponsors can then use or build upon that work license-free and incorporate it into products, or request that it be secured via patent protection.

In addition, as part of the DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative, JUMP 2.0 seeks to significantly improve performance, efficiency, and capabilities across a range of electronics systems.

“In 10 years, JUMP 2.0 envisions a world with new life breathed into Moore’s law where the Internet of Things can use RF-enabled sensors married to photonic communications techniques to distribute compute requirements across the edge or back into the cloud as appropriate,” Knapp said. “These capabilities are made possible by advances in cost-efficient, heterogeneously integrated memory and logic that leverages the newly developed materials and devices supported by this program.”

An ultracompact photonic data transmission system. Courtesy of Lightwave Research Lab/Columbia Engineering.

To that end, the centers will focus on JUMP 2.0’s seven complementary research themes: Cognition; Communications and Connectivity; Intelligent Sensing to Action; Systems and Architectures for Distributed Compute; Intelligent Memory and Storage; Advanced Monolithic and Heterogeneous Integration; and High-Performance Energy Efficient Devices.

Research institution partnerships

Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) will lead two of the seven centers. Through an investment of approximately $65.7 million, the Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (COCOSYS) and the Center on Cognitive Multispectral Sensors (COGNISENSE) will be established at the university. COCOSYS will be tasked with developing next-generation AI systems and architectures. COGNISENSE will focus on sensing capabilities and embedded intelligence to enable fast and efficient generation of actions.

Columbia University will host the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity, or CUbiC, to be established via a $35 million five-year grant. The center will focus on the advancement of energy-efficient communications technologies for addressing the vastly growing connectivity bottlenecks between data-hungry wireless devices and deluged data centers. Led by professor Keren Bergman, the CUbiC team’s principal investigators include professor of electrical engineering and expert in integrated circuits Harish Krishnaswamy, and professor of applied physics and silicon photonics pioneer Michal Lipson.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, which will target Jump 2.0’s Systems and Architectures for Distributed Compute theme. The center will have a budget of $39.6 million over five years.

The University of California, San Diego received a $35 million grant for the Center for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory (PRISM). The center, focused on the Intelligent Memory and Storage theme, will work on emerging memory devices and storage arrays for intelligent memory systems. A group of 10 universities will band together and contribute additional funds to create the $50.5 million center.

The Center for Heterogeneous Integration of Micro Electronic Systems (CHIMES) will be established at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) thanks to a $32.7 million grant. CHIMES participants will explore 23 research tasks under four synergistic themes, which include system-driven functional integration and aggregation; monolithic 3D densification and diversification on silicon platform; ultradense heterogeneous interconnect and assembly; and materials behavior, synthesis, metrology, and reliability.

Cornell University will establish the Superior Energy-Efficient Materials and Devices (SUPREME) Center. Huili Grace Xing, the William L. Quackenbush Professor of Engineering in materials science and engineering, and in electrical and computer engineering, at Cornell Engineering, will serve as the center’s director. Tomás Palacios, director of Microsystems Technology Laboratories and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, will serve as the center’s associate director. The center’s managing director will be Thomas Dienel, a condensed-matter physicist who has been running the user program at Cornell’s Platform for the Accelerated Realization, Analysis, and Discovery of Interface Materials (PARADIM). The $34 million center will be funded by SRC and its 14 partner universities. Cornell’s investment in the five-year project will be $7 million.