Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., announces the formation of the Center for Heterogeneous Integration Research in Packaging, or CHIRP, a new multimillion dollar semiconductor research center that will be co-directed by Ganesh Subbarayan, professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, and Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University, New York.
The center will be sponsored by Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), a technology research consortium that promotes collaborations among academic institutions, technology companies, and government agencies. It will provide $1.8 million to the center in the first four years; another $1.8 million will come from the campuses, the State University of New York, and other sources.
Binghamton and Purdue have a history of collaboration that stretches back nearly two decades. Roughly a dozen faculty members in engineering and computer science at the two institutions will participate in the center’s research. The center expects to expand in faculty participation as SRC initiates additional projects.
Heterogeneous integration of many microchips into single packages will be essential to technology ranging from cell phones to mainframe computers for at least the next decade, says Prof. Sammakia. “Anywhere you have chips that benefit from small transistors, we’re heading toward heterogeneous integration. It’s really the only solution available for the next five to 10 years. There’s an increasing challenge to shrink transistors much further. Other approaches, like quantum computing, are at least a decade away.”
Founding members of SRC’s CHIRP – including ARM, IBM, Intel, NXP Semiconductors, Samsung and Texas Instruments – will guide the research at Purdue and Binghamton.
