ECE profs collaborate on new MURI

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The Ohio State University is one of seven universities collaborating on a recently-announced Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award to the University of California, Santa Barbara in Dielectric Enhancements for Innovative Electronics. The Ohio State team includes electrical and computer engineering professors Siddharth Rajan and Steven A. Ringel.

This interdisciplinary program focuses on a new class of dielectric materials that enable semiconductor devices to achieve unprecedented speed and efficiency for computation and communication applications. Recent advances in this promising technology allowed companies such as Intel and IBM to scale transistors to sub 45 nm dimensions to achieve higher speed and lower power consumption in processors.

The program supports research by teams of investigators that intersect more than one traditional science and engineering discipline in order to accelerate both research progress and transition of research results to application. Researchers from Arizona State University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Yale University will also participate.

The MURI program is highly competitive. The Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) solicited proposals in 30 topics important to DoD and received a total of 411 white papers, which were followed by 152 proposals. The 32 awards announced for fiscal 2010 were selected based on merit review by panels of experts. The total amount of the awards is expected to be $227 million over five years.             

Read more details about the recently announced MURI awards in the Department of Defense news release and view the complete list of projects selected for fiscal 2010 funding.