Accelerated Design, Discovery, and Deployment of Electronic Phase Transitions (ADEPT)
The world has seen an enormous increase in global connectivity, information processing, and information storage driven by advances in technologies that rely largely on traditional semiconductors. Their underlying material platforms, however, are facing enormous challenges. A future generation of electronic devices can be established using materials which exist in multiple electronic states. Materials and devices that can be switched from an insulator to a metal by an external trigger would revitalize the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem, providing new paths to low-power computing systems and integration into systems for 6G and beyond applications. The project goal is to design and discover materials exhibiting such insulator-to-metal transitions (IMT) that enable room-temperature operation and display large changes in electrical resistivity. The research team, which comprises interdisciplinary expertise in computational and experimental materials physics, data science, and device engineering, aims to enable a culture shift in materials research, development, and deployment through training a well-equipped and diverse workforce with proficiencies in data-driven discovery of advanced materials. Leveraging Materials Genome Initiative principles, the team will deliver a tightly integrated codesign methodology to facilitate modeling and synthesis of new IMT materials with superior properties, and ultimately guide the design towards record-setting device performance to strengthen American leadership in future computing, storage and communication technologies and industries.