The work of a Notre Dame electrical engineering research team — including graduate students Wriddhi Chakraborty, Jorge Gómez Mir, and Huacheng Ye — was featured in vivid color in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences.
The Spectrum article highlighted the innovative work of the team, which is developing a new kind of DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) which can “holds bits hundreds or thousands of times longer than commercial DRAM and could provide huge area and energy savings when running large neural nets.”
The students fabricated the semiconducting oxide transistor (image above*) in the Notre Dame Nanofabrication Facility in Stinson-Remick Hall of Engineering. This new kind of transistor “has negligible leakage and holds the information carrying charge for a far longer time than conventional DRAM,” said Suman Datta, Stinson Professor of Nanotechnology and director of the Nanodevices and Circuits Lab.
Notre Dame collaborated with the circuit design team at Georgia Tech, led by Prof. Arijit Raychowdhury, to evaluate the performance of the memory at the array level.
The work addresses one of the biggest challenges in computing today, according to the article, and could accelerate the development of AI applications, which require huge amounts of memory integrated on the same chip.
Originally published by the College of Engineering on February 15, 2021
*STM-EDX Elemental map of our Indium-Tungsten-Oxide transistor devices used for Capacitorless 2-Transistor DRAM.