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Electronics for the Beyond Silicon Era
Electronics for the Beyond Silicon Era
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
The last 20 years the scientific and the business community have launched a gigantic effort towards the introduction of new materials and technologies that are envisioned to replace silicon technologies in many daily life’s applications. This global effort has been inspired by: (1) the demonstrated and recently published saturation of Moore’s law. This has set a limit in the number of transistors that can be intergraded into a single chip; as a consequence this restricts how fast electronics can be build, (2) there is a demand for new materials with superior electrical and thermal management properties than silicon, (3) there is a need for flexible, transparent, light weight and low processing cost materials compared to the respective properties of silicon. The beyond the silicon era includes a vast library of materials and technologies that satisfy some or even all the aforementioned characteristics. This library consists from inorganic, organic and hybrid materials such as: Organic semiconducting polymers, Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene & related materials, 2D new materials such as WS2, MoS2, perovskites, nitrides, metal oxides, Germanium electronics, Nanowires and hybrid organic-inorganic materials. The beyond silicon era does not only include new materials but also introduces new technologies that exploit electron properties apart its mobility under an electric field. Spintronics for example manifests the spin of the electron elevating the capacity of the modern hard discs or building low thermal consuming electronics.
Surprisingly and in contrast of the volume, the intensity of the implemented research (a great part of this research takes place in Universities’ labs) and the number of publications in themes related to the beyond silcon era the Higher Education looks to be absent and distant from the recent developments. Higher Education Institutions in few cases have included some of the microelectronics developments within postgraduate’s degree curricula. A total absence even in the form of popular science module is noticed from the undergraduate studies curricula of the majority of the respective University Departments (Electronics, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, Chemistry, Physics, Biology) curricula. TEI of Crete has identified this gap since 2010. TEI of Crete actions towards the education of mainly undergraduate students of the respective Departments included the organization of very successful (this is depicted from the participant’s feedback all these years) intensive programs in the fields of organic, transparent & flexible electronics and spintronics. The curricula of these intensive programs became by the years the core material of new undergraduate modules in many of the partner Universities and in the case of the OREA project soon will be converted in a European joint MSc degree (http//orea.chania.teicrete.gr). TEI of Crete with the proposed project makes a step further towards the modernization of the European undergraduate education regarding the technical skills in future technologies. The proposed project attempts to transfer the implemented laboratory - research outputs into the classroom. This proposal exploits TEI’s highly expertise Erasmus network in the fields of modern nano-electronics and attempts to unify its Erasmus concentrated knowledge & skills in the fields of organic, transparent, printable, graphene, spin electronics into a series of deliverables. On the frame of the proposed program we plan within a three years period to implement the following deliverables:
(1) Organization of spring and autumn schools (in a form of Intensive Programs) around the consortium Universities with main themes the developments in modern new electronics & applications based on organic and post-silicon materials. These events will be accredited and may be part of the partner Universities undergraduate curricula.
(2) Design, construction, run and evaluation of a semester’s module in the partner Universities. The latter could have the form of the blended course and will combine videos, web-based learning material, presentations and ‘traditional’ teaching methods.
(3) A short version of the module could be developed for professionals so to be used for fast track education in the field of new electronics and nano-electronics
The proposed project as a target group has the undergraduate and young graduate students of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Physics, Materials Sciences, Chemistry, Bio-Engineering Departments.
The educational material of the proposed project will be accessible from the collaborating European HEI and our colleagues in partner countries giving an European dimension.