PN: 18/06
Issue date: 15 May 2006

EPSRC funded scientists are playing a key role in the drive to make electronic gadgets smaller, smarter and even more powerful.

Researchers from five universities have received £5.3 million to design a new generation of 'nano-electronic' circuits (chips) that will power the computers and mobile phones of the future. The circuits may also make possible entirely new forms of electronic devices that could benefit a range of areas, including entertainment, communications and medicine.

The quest for new circuits has been prompted by the relentless advance of technology, which is now proving to be a real headache for the microelectronics industry. The microscopic transistors which are the cogs and wheels of all electronic devices are becoming even smaller and designers must now devise electronic circuits that are compatible with them.

Teams at the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton and York are striving to create nanoscale circuits, using transistors that are 80,000 times smaller than a hair’s breadth. Because the circuits in today’s ipods and PCs will not work with nano-transistors, this research is vital to prevent the industry from grinding to a halt.

In the next decade, transistors will not only be ten times smaller – they will also behave very differently. Two of today’s transistors, identical in shape and size, will behave in more or less the same way. That, however, will not be the case at nanoscale.

The next generation of transistors will, in the jargon of chip design, be 'unmatched' – despite being apparently identical. They will also be extremely 'noisy', adding a strong random signal of their own (known as device noise) to whatever signal they are dealing with.

"The circuits we currently use cannot cope with this form of mismatch and randomness," says Professor Alan Murray, of the University of Edinburgh. "They will require at least re-design - possibly even complete replacement - with circuits that have not yet been invented. We can’t wait for silicon technology to create viable, production-line nanoscale transistors. It will then be too late to start looking for ways to use them. We must start now."

This new project will allow circuits to be designed that can cope with, or even make use of, the unavoidable bad behaviour of nanoscale transistors.  It will use e-Science – which draws on shared data and massive computing power – to bring together computer simulations of transistors that do not yet exist and simulations of circuits that use them.

Professor Richard Sinnott, of the National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow, who will lead the e-Science development activity, is eagerly anticipating the project: "Through close collaboration with our partners, we expect to revolutionise the way in which the disparate teams involved in electronics design process work. Our Grid efforts will be on four key areas: workflows, security, data management and resource management, each targeted to the real needs of the scientists we are to support."

Notes for Editors:

The University partners in this project include the Device Modelling and the Microsystems Technology groups at the University of Glasgow, the Advanced Processor Technologies group at the University of Manchester, the Electronic Systems Design Group at the University of Southampton, the Intelligent Systems group at the University of York and the Mixed-Mode Design Group at the University of Edinburgh.

Principal investigator, Professor Asen Asenov, of the University of Glasgow, is looking forward to the challenge: “This project brings together leading semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-scientists with strong Grid expertise. Only by working in close collaboration, and adequately connected and resourced by e-Science and Grid technology, can we understand and tackle the design complexity of nano-CMOS electronics, securing a competitive advantage for the UK electronics industry.”

The e-Science and Grid technology will be provided by the National e-Science Centre run jointly by Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities and the e-Science North-West Centre at the University of Manchester.

The industrial partners include ARM and Wolfson Microelectronics (two of the largest UK fabless chip design companies), Synopsys (the world leader in design software) and Freescale, National Semiconductors and Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (leading semiconductor chip manufacturers). The project also received the support of the National Microelectronics Institute, the Trade Association for UK microelectronics.

e-Science is the very large scale science that can be carried out by pooling access to very large digital data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation held at different sites.
 
A computing grid refers to geographically dispersed computing resources that are linked together by software known as middleware so that the resources can be shared.  The vision is to provide computing resources to the consumer in a similar way to the electric power grid. The consumer can access electric or computing power without knowing which power station or computer it is coming from. 
 
The UK e-Science Programme as a whole is fostering the development of IT and grid technologies to enable new ways of doing faster, better or different research, with the aim of establishing a sustainable, national e-infrastructure for research and innovation. Further information at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/

For further information from the academics involved in this research, please contact the University of Glasgow Press Office on 0141 330 3535.

Coverage of this story on:

BBC News online http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4768323.stm

The Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/education.cfm?id=721662006