Ronald D. Schrimpf - US grants

This IGERT project will establish a multidisciplinary graduate program in reliability and risk engineering, analysis, and management at Vanderbilt University. Twenty-five faculty participants in this program are drawn from three different schools: Engineering (Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Management of Technology), Management, and Arts and Sciences (Mathematics). The research theme consists of three inter-linked areas: (i) large systems reliability and risk, (ii) device- and component-level reliability, and (iii) uncertainty analysis methods. As engineering systems grow in size, complexity and cost, reliability and risk assessment is increasingly dependent on modeling and simulation, rather than on expensive (or impossible) traditional test-based methods. Therefore, the unique features of the research theme are: (i) development of the modeling and simulation-based methodology for reliability and risk assessment, (ii) systematic integration of models and tools across disciplines, and (iii) inclusion of economic, legal, regulatory, and social perspectives in risk assessment and management. The research projects will apply these concepts to infrastructure, environmental, network, mechanical, and electronic systems. The educational goals are to broaden the training with multidisciplinary perspectives, embed information technology, include model integration and high performance computing technologies, and increase the number and diversity of reliability and risk engineers and managers trained in the modeling and simulation methodology. A number of strategies are proposed to achieve these objectives: multidisciplinary coursework and dissertation topics, laboratory rotations, industry and government laboratory internships, seminars, workshops, case studies, training in professional communication and ethics, undergraduate and high school teacher participants, aggressive recruitment (especially among underrepresented groups), and systematic evaluation by industry, government and academia. The program will include strong participation and support from several industries, government agencies and national laboratories, through internships, workshop and seminar participation, educational and research collaboration, and advisory committee. Through these efforts, the graduate program aims to become a self-sustaining center of national and international leadership. The IGERT award will lead to 35 Ph.D.'s over 9 years, fulfilling a critical need of the American industry in this important field.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.

I/UCRC for Integrated Design-for-Reliability for Electronics (iDRE)

1160865 University of California-Riverside; Albert Wang
1160870 Vanderbilt University; Bharat Bhuva

The University of California-Riverside (UC-R) and Vanderbilt University (VU) are collaborating to establish the proposed center, with UC-R as the lead institution.

The Center for Integrated Design-for-Reliability for Electronics (iDRE) will conduct research on investigating radiation and transient electrostatic discharge (ESD) induced failures to integrated circuits (IC), multi-chip nodules (MCM) and system-in-package (SiP), and microelectronics systems; as well as developing reliability solutions by integrated designs for industrial electronics. An additional objective of the planning grant proposal is to hold a meeting with potential industrial partners to discuss the research needs for integrated design-for-reliability (DfR) and center operation mechanisms.

If successful, research activities at the iDRE Center will reveal fundamentals and mechanisms of ESD and soft error failures, as well as deliver ESD protection and soft error mitigation solutions to advanced ICs and systems. The research outcomes will cast huge impacts on modern microelectronics and system products, and will have significant benefits to the electronic industry and the nation's economy. The proposed integrated DfR reliability solutions will affect all aspects of human lives, from communications and entertainment, to information processing and storage, to life-threatening devices and mission-critical tasks, and so on. The PIs also propose a diversity plan to promote involvement of female and underrepresented minority students in engineering education and research.

The demand for smaller, more efficient electronics has driven commercial companies to push the limits of scaling for transistors. Devices have moved from the 2D paradigm into the 3D paradigm for single transistors on the order of tens of nanometers. Highly miniaturized devices introduce reliability concerns such as hot carrier injection, where large undesirable currents lead to overall lifetime degradation and poor performance. Engineers often use simulation tools to understand hot carrier effects in devices. In order to reduce complexity and simulation time these tools abstract away much of the detailed physics which is necessary for the complex and miniaturized novel devices used today. This work will use a novel 3D simulation approach that is able to capture the necessary detailed physics for modeling the next- generation of devices. Understanding the physics of failure for these devices will ultimately lead to smaller, cheaper and more reliable electronics for the end user. This work also has the potential to impact our understanding of complimentary devices (e.g. LEDs, Solar Cells, etc.) and has implications for the renewable energy industry, resulting in increased access to affordable, reliable and clean energy to consumers around the world.

This work will use a Monte Carlo code suite with full-band capabilities to perform the first of its kind 3D model of hot carrier injection in gate-all-around field effect transistors. Anduril could prove to be the next gold standard of device simulation tools for modern 3D mianiaturized technologies. 3D simulations of hot carrier injection in stacked gate-all-around transistors will be compare to experimental characterization proposed in this work. The PI has access to vertically stacked gate-all-around transistors from imec which have been shown to have near-ideal subthreshold slopes (~67 mV/dec). With the PI?s secondary appointment she has the ability to recruit graduate talent and access to a full suite of reliability testing equipment in the Radiation and Reliability group at Vanderbilt. DC stress conditions and 1/f noise measurements will be conducted under the advisement of the PI at Vanderbilt. Additionally, simulations using the Anduril code suite will be conducted using the ACCRE super- computing cluster. Simulations will occur in phases beginning with a single gate-all-around transistor, whose reliability has been studied experimentally, and ultimately a stacked gate-all-around architecture, whose reliability is less understood. The work proposed by the PI is timely and relevant given the current trends moving to vertically stacked gate-all-around transistors, and the large knowledge gaps that still exist for understanding the physics of failure driving hot carrier degradation in these devices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.