Cornell engineers key to multiple federal microelectronics projects

Cornell Engineering-led projects designed to accelerate research into quantum and communications leap-ahead technologies - innovations that enable significant advances over current systems - received significant support from the U.S. Department of Defense, officials with the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH) recently announced.

NORDTECH is a regional consortium of government labs, defense companies, academic institutions, and technology manufacturing organizations in New York state and one of eight hubs composing the U.S. Microelectronics Commons program. Of the four federal awards totaling more than $30 million that NORDTECH announced on Sept. 18, three involve critical participation from Cornell Engineering faculty.

Debdeep Jena, the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading a project to unlock the 90% of output power currently untapped in high-speed gallium nitride high-electron mobility transistors used for defense radar and communication systems. His project, titled "Nitride RF Next-Generation Technology (NITRIDER)," which is expected to receive more than $8.4 million, includes collaborators from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the U.S. Navan Research Laboratory, Northrup Grumman, Soctera, Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, Crystal IS, and Qorvo.

Karan Mehta, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is co-leading a project with the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics) that will develop a novel 300-millimeter foundry fabrication platform for quantum technologies which will span the ultraviolet to the infrared. The project, titled "Quantum Ultra-Broadband Photonic Integrated Circuits and Systems (QUPICS)," which is expected to receive more than $8.5 million, includes collaborators from Rochester Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Yale University, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Quantinuum, Xanadu, and Toptica.

Valla Fatemi, an assistant professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, also received a sub-award as part of an $8.9 million project led by the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science (NY CREATES) that aims to demonstrate scalable quantum error correction, using new materials, innovative quantum circuits and qubit control schemes. Additional collaborators hail from Princeton University, Syracuse University, New York University, QCi, SEEQC, Cadence, and AFRL's Information Directorate.

Krystyn Van Vliet, Cornell's vice president for research and innovation and a professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, noted that these projects show the power of diverse research teams in action.

"I am looking forward to all that Cornell researchers and their project partners across New York and the U.S. will contribute to NORDTECH and the Microelectronics Commons," Van Vliet said, as Cornell's founding member of NORDTECH's governance committee. "Not only will these project teams aim to demonstrate leap-aheads on technical challenges in microelectronics materials and devices using the NORDTECH ecosystem, these project teams will also foster the next generation of ambitious, creative U.S. talent that better connect the dots between lab to fab, between discovery and utility, and between societal need and societal benefit."