The CHIPS act has made it clear that silicon based microelectronic devices struggle to keep up with today’s technology demands. The development of advanced semiconductor materials that perform with enhanced energy-efficiency at high power and frequency is critical to sustained commercial innovation and defense applications. Here, I will introduce a genomic strategy and new descriptors for the discovery of advanced semiconductors in 3 different applications: (1) ultra-wide-band-gap (Eg > 3.4 eV) semiconductors that overcome the historic challenges of unipolar dopability and poor thermal conductivity while advancing the energy conversion efficiency of power electronics, (2) high-mobility, back-end-of-line compatible semiconductors that allows vertical integration of transistors to boost transistor density, and (3) multi-component oxides with tunable resistive switching dynamics via local configurations that allows task-specific computing with low stochastic noise and low power consumption in non-filamentary memristors. Thin films of the predicted materials are for the first time synthesized by epitaxial growth techniques (e.g., molecular beam epitaxy and pulsed laser deposition). I will conclude with the experimental demonstration of >1000 improved energy efficiency of computing based on the discovery of new materials.
Sieun Chae is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She received her B.S. (2015) in Materials Science and Engineering from Yonsei University and worked as a research fellow at Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (2015-2017). She then received Ph.D. (2022) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan and completed her postdoctoral research in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. Her vision is to parallelize the rational design of materials atom by atom: from atomistic theory to atomic layer by layer synthesis. She is best known for her works in the discovery of new ultra-wide-band-gap semiconductors genomic approaches. Her research has been highlighted as Nature Electronics (2024), editors pick in APL (2020) and APL (2021), the most cited featured article in APL (2018), invited review articles in APL (2021), APL (2024), and MPL (2024).