Electronics is nowadays pervasive in all aspects of our lives, covering consumer electronics, industrial automation processes and manufacturing, wireless communications, robotics, drones and transport, cloud communications, security and biometrics, automotive and domotics, just to cite a few. As such, the electronics industry plays a dominant role both in terms of macro-economic income (e.g. gross domestic product, market, employments) and in terms of social impact (e.g. social media, artificial intelligence, and internet of things). However, the eroding cost of electronic products along with the ballooning costs of infrastructures and goods are posing serious limitations to the competitiveness and the sustainability of many semiconductor companies. Most critical aspects are related to lack of innovation, inefficient manufacturing and testing of devices that reduce competitiveness and profitable growth.
Information-and-communication technologies have been historically powered by silicon, with development and production taking place mostly in the United States and in Asia. The current and major worldwide drive for big data, machine learning, and quantum computing will push away from this all-silicon platform, and provide a unique opportunity and a clean slate for European industry to rapidly deploy novel technologies based on innovative materials and devices. Leadership requires fast exploration of materials’ properties (e.g. memory effects for memristive computing), linking properties to performance in unexplored architectures, and assessing their business potential. This calls for the innovative tools for the investigation of materials at the device level. Materials modelling can efficiently contribute to this process reducing the experimental trials and fostering efficient top-down and bottom-up design paradigms.
During the project we implemented the IM2D box which is a multi-physics, multi-model, multi-equation, hierarchical and scale-reversible model for material-to-device and device-to-material optimization for an easier exploration of the material workspace from an electronic device-oriented industrial perspective.
A beta version of the code is presently (M40) in the final testing and validation phase, and is available for early adopters. The official release of IM2D is foreseen in summer 2022. The cose has been also presented to possible stakeholders in a set of public dissemination events.
We applied IM2D to pilot cases (ovonic threshold switch selectors and ferroelectric devices) that are pivotal in the field of synaptic electronics and in-memory computing. Besides IM2D, we identified other projects outcomes (KERs) as possible innovation results, to be promoted and disseminated beyond the end of the project.
