The MIT-led projects will investigate novel high-performance designs, materials, processes, and assessment methods for an environmentally sustainable microchip industry.
April 25, 2024
David L. Chandler | Elizabeth A. Thomson | MIT News | Materials Research Laboratory
Two teams led by MIT researchers were selected in December 2023 by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator, a part of the TIP Directorate, to receive awards of $5 million each over three years. The NSF Convergence Accelerator is a multidisciplinary and multisector program whose goal is to accelerate use-inspired research into solutions that have societal impact. The Convergence Accelerator’s Track I: Sustainable Materials for Global Challenges, headed by Program Director Linda Molnar, funds projects to develop solutions which both capture the full product life cycle through the advancement of fundamental science and use circular design to create environmental and economically sustainable materials and products.
The MIT teams chosen for this current round of funding belong to Track I and will address current and future needs for environmental sustainability and scalability in advanced semiconductor products across the entire value chain.
The FUTUR-IC team, led by Anuradha Agarwal, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory, will innovate to address the major bottleneck to the continued scaling of microchip performance at constant cost, power, and improved environmental footprint, with a STEM and green-innovation-trained workforce, by pioneering pathways for the heterogeneous integration of processor, accelerator, and memory chips within a common package. The team does so by creating new electronic-photonic integration technologies which provide high-bandwidth and low-latency data transfer, with reduced environmental impact in both the manufacturing and use phases. And, because there is no incumbent technology to displace, demonstration of this combined three-dimensional technology-ecology-workforce approach, within an alliance of industry leaders, will facilitate easier industry adoption.
Toward electronic-photonic integration for sustainable microchip design, production, and use
The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to greenhouse gas emissions, and every year the world produces more than 50 million metric tons of electronic waste. Further, the data centers necessary for complex computations and huge amount of data transfer — think AI and on-demand video — are growing and will require 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.
“The current microchip manufacturing supply chain which includes production, distribution, and use, is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue. Together with our workforce, we must innovate our way out of this crisis with a new mindset of performance improvement within environmental constraints. Our academic-industry teams are creating solutions for current hot point technology transitions, and we take responsibility for placing technology-ecology solution tools in the hands of the next generation of semiconductor thought leaders,” says Agarwal.
The name of the team, FUTUR-IC captions the team’s mission of sustainable microchip manufacturing of future integrated circuits. Says Agarwal, “The current microchip scaling trend requires judicious use of mixed technology chiplets for higher speed and increased functionality within a common package platform for 2.5D and 3D heterogenous electronic-photonic integration. FUTUR-IC is enabling this foundational PFAS-free platform to achieve a package I/O target of 1.6 Pb/s data rates using chip-to-chip evanescence and micro-reflection within photonic interconnects. This form of electronic-photonic integration enables modularity for easier disassembly and helps meet ecology constraints of affordable and accessible repair of microchips in systems, decreasing energy consumption, as well as cutting electronic and chemical waste and greenhouse gas emissions associated with electronics by 50 percent every 10 years.”
FUTUR-IC alliance has 26 global collaborators and is growing. Current external collaborators include the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI), Tyndall National Institute, SEMI, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Agarwal leads FUTUR-IC in close collaboration with others, including, from MIT, Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, co-PI; Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, co-PI; Randolph Kirchain, principal research scientist, co-PI; Greg Norris, director of MIT’s Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE), and Elizabeth Unger, research scientist. All are affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. They are joined by Samuel Serna, MIT visiting professor and assistant professor of physics at Bridgewater State University, a co-PI.
Other key personnel include Aristide Gumyusenge, assistant professor, Sajan Saini, education director, and Pradnya Nagarkar, technical program manager, all at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Timothy Swager, professor at the Department of Chemistry; Peter O’Brien, professor from Tyndall National Institute; and Shekhar Chandrashekhar, CEO of iNEMI.
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