Los Alamos lab to research next-gen chip technologies

Radiation-hardening for space environments and energy efficiency tweaks for above and below

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is leading a project to transform how chips are designed and manufactured, to make them more energy efficient and able to better tolerate environmental conditions such as radiation.

The New Mexico research and development lab will combine its own Nano Solutions On-Chip project (NSOC) with three others into a new Microelectronics Science Research Center (MSRC) called CHIME, which stands for Co-design and Heterogeneous Integration in Microelectronics for Extreme Environments.

NSOC will focus on nanoscale semiconductors, such as quantum dots, to create devices that use photons and electrons to carry information. The research is to involve stacking electronic and photonic components into three-dimensional structures, which LANL scientists claim will solve some of those energy-efficiency and manufacturing challenges, and may lead to a greater tolerance of radiation effects.

Radiation can cause havoc with normal semiconductors as charged particles will interfere with the normal functioning of the circuits, requiring them to be carefully shielded or hardened for environments where radiation is likely to be present.

"This project aims to solve a key issue in electronics, that due to a dependency on electrons as information carriers, integrated circuits are reaching limits in bandwidth density, speed and distances," explained Jennifer Hollingsworth, a scientist and laboratory fellow at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) who is heading up NSOC and will serve as the first chair of CHIME.

"The complexity required to accommodate improvements on integrated circuits means as much as 30 miles of wires shuttling electrical data across 10 or more different levels of a chip, all produced by increasingly inefficient manufacturing processes," she claimed.

Other projects at the center will tackle different challenges to optimize performance, including heterogenous integration, where components are manufactured separately then combined into a single chip. The projects will develop and study the effectiveness of various materials, processes and technologies that could be used in producing chips, according to LANL.

CINT co-director Adam Rondinone said the CHIME center aims to bridge the 'lab-to-fab' gap seen in the progression of semiconductor technology, so that its research can translate into scalable technology to address critical societal and industrial needs.

This concern was one the Department of Defense (DoD) was also seeking to address when it pumped $238 million into several Microelectronics Commons regional innovation hubs in 2023, with the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks describing the "lab-to-fab" gap as "the infamous valley of death between R&D and production."

The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University and Sandia National Laboratories are also partners with LANL on the NSOC project.

LANL last week confirmed it was working with OpenAI to deploy its reasoning-capable o1 LLM on the lab's Venado to identify new approaches to treating diseases, protect the power grid, boost the US's cybersecurity, and work on high-energy physics research.

The Microsoft-backed AI maker already had another project in the works with the lab, begun in 2024, to probe the use of AI in bioscientific research, including an assessment of the risk involved when artificial intelligence is used to develop bioweapons.

In related news, First Buddy Elon Musk's attempt to block that company's attempt to transition into a for-profit enterprise suffered a setback yesterday, with legal site Law360 reporting that US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had criticized "Musk's filings for being vague and broad" and promising to "toss some claims." ®