Photo provided by: University officials
Charles Paillard
The Department of Energy has awarded just under $975,000 to Charles Paillard, a university research professor of physics and director of the Center for Smart Ferroic Materials, to study scandium aluminum nitride at the atomic level. This research could lay the foundation for computers that use less energy and are dramatically faster than current technology.
“Generally speaking, we’re looking for ways to move atoms around at the lowest possible energy cost,” Paillard said.
The project is a partnership with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
In the United States, data centers account for 2% of energy consumption, and that number is expected to rise as demand for high-speed or AI computing increases. Ferroelectrics are a type of material with spontaneous polarity that can be reversed by an external voltage, and are expected to help create faster computers with less energy consumption.
“Most of the ferroelectrics we know are made of oxides and are very difficult to integrate into ubiquitous silicon platforms,” Paillard says. “So we decide to change all the computing technology in the world, which will cost tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, take decades. Either we find new ferroelectric materials that are easier to integrate.”
The focus of Paillard’s research, aluminum scandium nitride, can be incorporated into existing silicon chips and has recently been shown to have the ferroelectric properties needed for high-speed computers.
Paillard’s research seeks to understand at the atomic level how aluminum scandium nitride switches its polarity because it uses a different switching mechanism than other ferroelectrics. The main focus is to investigate the domain walls of aluminum scandium nitride, the space between negative and positive polarities.
As part of this project, a postdoctoral researcher or graduate student from the University of California will spend time at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Central Spellec School of Engineering in France, where the researchers will have access to an electron microscope.
“Exploring such a complex topic in such a vast array of ways requires complementary groups to collaborate,” Paillard said. “I think this is a global effort.”
This grant is sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Established Program for the Advancement of Competitive Research (EPSCoR). University of A physics professors Laurent Berreche and Gregory Salamo are co-principal investigators on the project.
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