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Director's Message

  

  Welcome to the Joint Research Center for Microelectronics (JRCM). In an era defined by rapid technological advancement, microelectronics serves as the foundational engine driving global innovation—from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to renewable energy and advanced healthcare.

   Our center was established with a singular, ambitious vision: to push the boundaries of semiconductor science and engineering through collaborative synergy. By bridging the gap between world-class academic research and cutting-edge industrial applications, we strive to translate fundamental discoveries into transformative, real-world technologies.

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News

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Technology Roadmap of Bioinspired Computing Hardware

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly constrained by fundamental hardware bottlenecks in computation throughput and energy efficiency. Bioinspired computing (BIC) offers a promising alternative by emulating the intrinsic advantages of biological systems, such as parallelism, adaptability, and robustness. Progress in BIC hardware demands interdisciplinary convergence that bridges materials science and device physics with neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, and information science. Therefore, the development of this crossdisciplinary field urgently requires a comprehensive roadmap that analyzes systematically and in-depth the frontier issues and the latest progress. In this roadmap, we categorize the critical challenges into three components: hardware foundations, architectures, and prototype realizations. We highlight how biological features inspire the design of BIC hardware through device physics and discuss their performance metrics and engineering challenges. We then describe how diverse signaling rules and structural organizations in BIC architectures support specific computational prototypes, including electronic and photonic BIC chips, and present a technological roadmap that outlines opportunities to expand the functional scope of BIC hardware through coordinated advances in devices, architectures, and system demonstrations. This ongoing convergence of interdisciplinary knowledge can help accelerate the shift toward high-efficiency AI hardware.
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Band-hybridized selenium contact for p-type semiconductors

Semimetals can establish a low-resistance contact to semiconductors by suppressing metal-induced gap states. Although semimetals like bismuth have enabled an ultralow contact resistance for n-type two-dimensional semiconductors by mitigating metal-induced gap states, achieving a similar performance for p-type two-dimensional counterparts remains a notable hurdle. Here we introduce an ultrathin selenium interfacial layer with the highest work function among elements, effectively reducing the Schottky barrier height at the interface. Critically, the selenium layer interacts with the gold electrode, inducing band hybridization that transforms the contact interface from a semiconductor to a semimetal. This semimetallic characteristic, with its low density of states near the Fermi level, suppresses the formation of detrimental metal-induced gap states within the semiconductor. Applying this band-hybridized semimetallic contact to p-type WSe2 transistors results in a reduction in contact resistance to 540 Ω μm. Furthermore, the devices achieve a saturated ON-state current density of up to 430 μA μm 1 with an 80-nm channel length. This methodology is highly transferable and can be readily applied to other p-type semiconductors, including black phosphorus and carbon nanotubes, offering a scalable and reliable pathway for establishing low-resistance electrical contacts to nanoscale p-type semiconductor devices.

Research Direction

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Near-sensor and In-sensor Computing

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Emegring Memories

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