Our research on phase change materials for photonic and electronics has been highlighted by our School of Engineering on the framework of the CHIPS and Science Act.
Read the full article here: Engineering Headway in Microelectronics Manufacturing
“We have a great clean room for semiconductor fabrication here, great staff working there, and we have courses that enable students to gain experience working in the fab. That’s something that stands out compared to other schools.” Yi-Siou Huang
Here an excerpt:
Finding new materials
Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo’s research combines photonics and electronics to create new materials that can be controlled by light instead of electric current. “Finding better semiconductors and alternative functional materials is necessary, especially to replace those raw materials used today, which can be hard to mine and source,” says Ríos Ocampo, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering who is working on a class of new materials for photoelectronics, called phase-change materials, that can be used to create efficient devices with better memories, capable of retaining information for a much longer time.
In 2023, his research group, along with UMD collaborators Professor Ichiro Takeuchi and Associate Professor Yifei Mo and other partners, received $2 million under the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Future of Semiconductors (FuSe) program to discover new phase-change materials for semiconductors that are high-performance, energy-efficient, and sustainable. The CHIPS and Science Act, Ríos Ocampo says, can accelerate such research and help boost “manufacturing muscles” in the U.S.
