Berkeley Wins Grant for Semiconductor Research
The University of California at Berkeley was one of five universities named Tuesday as a “center of excellence” and was awarded a still unspecified grant to conduct advanced research into new techniques for manufacturing semiconductors.
The award was made by Sematech, the semiconductor research consortium created a year ago to lead efforts by U.S. companies to regain supremacy in chip making from their Japanese counterparts.
The Berkeley project, which also includes smaller, related research efforts at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University, will study optical lithography--an advanced form of photographic engraving--as a means of etching fine electrical circuitry onto silicon wafers. The research project is expected to run five years.
Funding to Be Determined
The California universities had asked Sematech for $1.9 million annually to support the project, but the consortium has said that when the funding level is determined, it will be somewhere from $500,000 to $1.5 million a year.
Also named centers of excellence were: the University of Arizona, a group of universities in New Jersey, the University of New Mexico and the Massachusetts Microelectronics Center. Twelve groups submitted research proposals.
The research projects are Sematech’s first large-scale undertaking since its creation in March, 1987, as a joint effort by the federal government and several large U.S. chip makers and other high-technology companies.
UC Berkeley’s inclusion as one of the research centers is something of a consolation prize for California. The state had offered San Jose as the permanent headquarters for the consortium but lost the spirited competition in January to Austin, Tex. The consortium, which eventually hopes to operate a manufacturing facility, expects that at full capacity it will have an annual operating budget of $250 million and as many as 800 employees.
Major IBM Research Facility
Sematech’s announcement came on the same day that International Business Machines Corp. announced that it is creating a major supercomputer research facility at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
The center, already a major IBM research facility, will have three IBM supercomputers that will help scientists design computers whose activities are patterned after the workings of the human brain, that create moving color animations and that study crystalline atomic structure.
IBM said plans call for additional supercomputers to be installed at other research sites in San Jose and Zurich, Switzerland.
