About Us
Moving Beyond CMOS and its Scaling Paradigm
As complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit technologies continue to shrink, we will encounter fundamental physical limits, and the costs of integrated circuits will continue to grow. Even for those applications which can afford the costs, there are increasingly urgent large parameter variations and defects. These challenges make configurable integrated circuits more attractive for many applications, but methods of electrical addressing and configuration can be costly in terms of power, area, and performance.
At the current rate of increase, lithography tools will cost $1 billion in twenty years. MISCIC research aims to break the trend. Source: Gordon Moore ISSCC 2003
In order to push beyond current capabilities, the DARPA/Carnegie Mellon MISCIC Center is exploring using integrated mechanical technologies to address and modify integrated electronics. Recent advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), including those developed for probe storage systems, offer a plausible manufacturing method. The well-known work of Vettiger et al. at IBM on the Millipede project successfully demonstrated the integration of nanoscale probe access and manipulation with technologies suitable for integration with CMOS.
MISCIC Center Thrust Areas
MISCIC Center experts focus on three thrust areas: materials and device physics, nanomanipulation systems, and circuit design and integration. We draw on the university's expertise in MEMS through the MEMS Laboratory; circuits, through the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI); and probe storage devices, through the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC), to understand the fundamentals of placing MEMS devices within dense CMOS-like chips.
Funding for the MISCIC Center is provided by industrial support matched by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and also by grants from Seagate and Intel for existing probe storage research at Carnegie Mellon.
Through our new Center for Memory Intensive Self-Configuring Integrated Circuits, we will create new nanoscale chip designs and architectures that will be intelligent enough to fix themselves.
- T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger, MISCIC Center Director and ECE Department Head