US university teams up with IBM,AMD and Cadence

US university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has launched a $100m collaboration with IBM and New York State to create what it claims is the world’s most powerful university-based supercomputing centre.

The Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), which ranks as one of the top-10 supercomputing centres, is based on the Rensselaer campus and at its Rensselaer Technology Park in New York. It is designed to help continue the advances in shrinking device dimensions seen by electronics manufacturers, and to extend this model to a wide range of industries that could benefit from nanotechnology.

Cadence Design Systems, an electronic design automation (EDA) software developer, and AMD will collaborate with Rensselaer and IBM at the Supercomputing Center in advanced simulation and modeling of nanoelectronic devices and circuitry.

The CCNI will focus on reducing the time and costs associated with designing and manufacturing nanoscale materials, devices, and systems.

“This new supercomputing center dedicated to nanotechnology will have global impact,” said Rensselaer president Shirley Ann Jackson.

“Current semiconductor technology is rapidly approaching its practical limits. New, nanotechnology-based technologies will be needed to sustain the productivity growth that the information technology industry provides to the world economy,” added John Kelly III, IBM’s senior vice president of technology and intellectual property.
The ability to design and manufacture smaller, cheaper, and faster semiconductor devices is crucial to sustaining Moore’s Law. Chip designers and manufacturers have sustained Moore’s prediction by continually shrinking the size of devices on semiconductor chips. Today’s circuit components measure about 65nm in width, or 65 billionths of a meter. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, this needs to shrink to 45nm by 2009, 35nm by 2012, and22 nm by 2015.

The continued miniaturisation of semiconductor technology is forcing the need for simulation across an unprecedented broad range of dimensions all the way down to the atomic scale.

“The CCNI will bring together university and industry researchers under one roof to conduct a broad range of computational simulations, from the interactions between atoms and molecules up to the behavior of the complete device. This will help enable the semiconductor industry to bridge the gaps between fundamental device science, design, and manufacturing at the nanoscale,” said Omkaram (Om) Nalamasu, vice president for research at Rensselaer.