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C-SPIN Quarterly Newsletter • Volume 3 • Issue 2 • May 2016
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A Message from the Director, Prof. Jian-Ping Wang

Welcome, everyone to the Quarterly Newsletter. First, I have to say I really enjoyed reading the interview with Dr. Todd Younkin, a STARnet program manager. We all have a lot of questions about future information technology: I am sure you will get some answers out of the interview. I would also like to bring to your attention an excellent article in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly, which discusses the challenges of developing future computing technologies. The article includes a lot of interesting discussion related to our work and goals, and highlights the demand for our research.

Second, I would like to share with you that C-SPIN PIs and students have continued to generate exciting results. In particular, Prof. Geoff Beach published his latest research achievement on skyrmions in February issue of Nature Materials, and Prof. Mingzhong Wu published his new discovery of photon-generated spin current based on C-SPIN materials in a recent issue of Nature Physics. Read More.


Q&A with Todd Younkin, STARnet Program Manager

Q: What inspired you to temporarily leave Intel and become Program Manager for STARnet?
Heusler Workshop, Butler and Wang The SRC’s pre-competitive, external research model has been a critical part of Intel’s success. It has helped to foster world-class research and has led many intelligent, hard-working students to prosperous careers in the semiconductor industry. These folks, in turn, have fueled many of the innovations that are coming down the pipeline or are now in the products we routinely take for granted! So when the opportunity arose early last year to become the STARnet program manager and to help shape a follow-on research engagement with DARPA, it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. It really sold itself.

Q: You've followed the six STARnet centers since they began in Nov. 2012. How have they lived up to STARnet's mission to develop beyond-CMOS technologies and solve complex systems integration problems?
When I was a Ph.D. student (studying organometallic and polymer chemistry), you went into the lab, nurtured a few of your ideas, stumbled across some serendipity that you later tried to explain, and – PRESTO – you emerged from the lab a few years later with a thesis and, hopefully, a job. Seeing how the students from these six STARnet centers collaborate with researchers from other centers, universities, scientific disciplines, etc. is truly inspiring! Today’s students are also able to balance simulations and experiments in a way that would not have been possible just a few short years ago. As a result of this ‘socialized’ and well-balanced research approach, the students from our six STARnet centers have been able to quickly understand and tackle very complex problems that span a wide array of topics: precursors for 2D materials, mm3 sensor nodes, approximate computing, heterogeneous integration, memory-centric computing, and networks of networks, and others. The good news is that the STARnet centers continue to exceed their mandate and have raised the bar above what folks perceived to be possible just a few short years ago. The challenge, of course, is that we are now being asked to innovate at an even faster pace in order to stay competitive against the global research agenda. Read More.


C-SPIN Welcomes Two New PIs

Kang Wang

Prof. Kang Wang (Univ. of California Los Angeles) will collaborate with Ching-Tzu Chen of IBM to realize antiferromagnetic exchange bias spin-orbit torque memory for Theme 4. He will also study physical phenomena related to spin-orbit coupling (such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect and spin-orbit torque) with an eye toward practical applications for topological insulators and transition metals.

Prof. Wang is no stranger to SRC research. He has collaborated with C-SPIN PIs Christian Binek and Jian-Ping Wang, and he directed the Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA) center for FCRP (STARnet’s predecessor) 2003-13.

Prof. Wang is currently the Raytheon Chair Professor of Physical Science and the primary investigator of UCLA’s Device Research Laboratory. He received his PhD from MIT in 1970, taught at MIT 1970-72, worked for General Electric Corporate Research 1972-79, and has been a member of the UCLA Electrical Engineering faculty since 1979.


Tony Low Tony Low Prof. Tony Low Prof. Tony Low (Univ. of Minnesota) will collaborate with Jian-Ping Wang to develop an atomistic simulation tool for studying MTJ devices in which the oxide layer is a 2D oxide material and Heusler alloys as magnetic contacts. This work is part of Themes 1, 2, and 4.

Before joining the Center, Prof. Low collaborated with C-SPIN PIs Steve Koester and Mo Li on a variety of projects. He has worked extensively in academia (Cornell and Yale) and industry (IBM) since receiving his PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2008. Since 2014, he has been an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.


Post-Doc and Student Profiles

Danielle Reifsnyder Hickey Postdoctoral Researcher, Univ. of Minnesota

Danielle Reifsnyder HickeyI'm currently working on analytical electron microscopy research in the laboratory of Prof. Andre Mkhoyan for Theme 2. I am working to understand the atomic-scale structure and composition of heterostructured materials such as topological insulators and magnetic tunnel junctions. In both cases, the controlled growth of multiple layers of dissimilar materials is critical to making devices work, and so the interfaces must be well understood. The goal is to understand emerging materials, how they grow, and the structures they form when incorporated into devices. Read More.

Salinporn Kittiwatanakul Postdoctoral Researcher, Univ. of Virginia

Salinporn Kittiwatanakul

I am currently using a novel technique, Reactive Bias Target Ion Beam Deposition, to develop high-quality Cr2O3 thin film with reduced leakage and smooth surface to be used as an insulator for voltage controlled magnetoelectric switching in p-MTJs. These thin films could improve the power consumption and reliability of spin-based systems. I’m also working on integrating metal-insulator oxides such as NbO2 and VO2 into MTJ devices and to modulate the magnetic properties of MTJ free layers using the MIT of the oxides. My work, which is overseen by Jiwei Lu, falls under Themes 1 and 4. Read More.


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