Sanghamitra Neogi News

Seminar - From Atoms to Devices: Designing Materials for Future Devices - Oct. 13

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:54:12 +0000

Seminar - From Atoms to Devices: Designing Materials for Future Devices - Oct. 13 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/02/2023 - 10:54

Sanghamitra Neogi
Assistant Professor, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Oct. 13 | 10:40 a.m. | AERO 120

Abstract: In this seminar, I will present an overview of the research activities of my group, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modeling (ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTAM) Laboratory. In ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTAM Laboratory, we design and discover new materials to realize future technologies. Additionally, we discover novel pathways to transport energy and information in nano- to microscale materials that will transform existing technologies. We combine concepts from solid state physics, materials chemistry, nano- to microscale device physics and engineering, and contribute to four research fields:

Artificial Intelligence for Materials Discovery focuses on the application of data-driven approaches for rapid design and discovery of novel materials and structures for a broad range of technologies. Our projects include Materials Design for Thermoelectric and Microelectronic Technologies and Hypersonic Vehicles.
Designing Materials for Harsh Environments: High temperature, oxidation or radiation conditions strongly affect the properties of materials and their performance in applications. We investigate the change of materials properties and design materials that can sustain extreme environments. Our projects include Materials Design for Thermal Barrier Coating, Hypersonic Vehicles and Radiation-Hard Microelectronics.
Thermal Management: Ultra-high-frequency lattice vibrations, known as phonons, are the heat energy carriers that determine the heat conduction properties of materials. We develop strategies to control, manipulate and guide phonons in materials. Efficient thermal management will improve thermal protection systems, and is key to realize faster, more reliable and energy efficient devices. Our projects include Materials Design for Thermoelectric Technology and Development of Thermal Model of Microelectronics.
Tuning Interaction Between Energy/Information Carriers: Recent research uncovered fundamentally new quantum sensing, memory, and computing paradigm by manipulating interaction between information carriers such as polarizations of a photon or spin states of an atom or an electron. We investigate strategies to control and manipulate the interaction between quantized electron spin waves and lattice vibrations for solid-state quantum memory and transduction applications.

Bio: Sanghamitra Neogi is an Assistant Professor at the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. Additionally, she is a Program Faculty at the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. Prior to joining ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, she received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from the Pennsylvania State University and was a postdoctoral research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany. Her research received mention in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics article “The 2022 applied physics by pioneering women: a roadmap.” She is an Associate Editor for the European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems.

In this seminar, I will present an overview of the research activities of my group, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modeling (ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTAM) Laboratory. In ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTAM Laboratory, we design and discover new materials to realize future technologies. Additionally, we discover novel pathways to...

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 16:29:45 +0000

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/14/2023 - 10:29

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Sanghamitra Neogi
Headline Video: Heat flow in nanoscale materials with confined dimensions.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to revolutionize how manufacturers model and deal with heat in computers.

“Thermal challenges are very much known, but right now management of it is very trial and error,” Neogi said.

It is well documented that microchips and transistors fail due to heating challenges. Mitigation to this point has primarily been through bigger fans and cooling channels, but as chips have gotten smaller to pack in more processing power, heat has become a larger issue.

“With microelectronics, we are moving away from planar chips to 3D stacked chips because it makes memory and processing quicker, but you can’t cool the inner channels using regular methods because you don’t have the real estate. The current ideas don’t work very well,” Neogi said.

To find new solutions, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Neogi’s team a $1 million contract over 18 months to create an atomistic thermal model of microelectronic systems. In addition to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, the team also includes Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin from the University of California, Berkeley and Prof. Kaushik Roy from Purdue University.

Neogi and her team will start by creating computational thermal model of individual transistors at the deeply scaled nanometer level, one millionth of a millimeter in size, and will then expand the model to a millimeter-scale circuit element with 300,000 transistors.

“We’re going to predict how the temperature map looks like; which zones are hot and which zones are cold. But most importantly, why certain zones are hot and cold,” she said.

Although the chips are extremely small, the modeling is a significant undertaking, requiring supercomputing resources, machine learning, and artificial intelligence Neogi said.

“Inclusion of AI at different length scales will be a major component of this research. Right now thermal modeling is very trial and error. We want to be able to instead predict how things will fail. If we are successful, we will have a new thermal approach not just for chips, but microelectronic circuits, sensors, devices. We are building a method that scales dramatically,” she said.

Although DARPA is interested in the research from a military application perspective, the work could also have broad applications across all electronic devices.

Neogi is especially excited about the project’s alignment with the federal CHIPS Act of 2022, which seeks to dramatically expand semiconductor research and development in the United States. Although her project is funded separately, the work is highly synced with CHIPS research.

“This is a fundamental thing that is at the heart of all electronics. Thermal challenges affect all of them at the very core,” she said.

The full title of the DARPA program is Thermal Modeling of Nanoscale Transistors (Thermonat). The contract officially begins August 14, 2023.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat. An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to...

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Faculty in Focus: Sanghamitra Neogi

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 17:07:50 +0000

Faculty in Focus: Sanghamitra Neogi Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/30/2023 - 10:07

Jeff Zehnder

Sanghamitra Neogi is designing new materials at the quantum level to realize future technologies for thermal management and harsh environments like hypersonic flight.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Materials Science and Engineering Program, Neogi leads the ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTUM laboratory, short for ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modelling.

The lab is also leading the way in investigating novel pathways to transport energy and information in nanoscale materials to optimize existing technologies.

Watch the video below to find out more:

[video:https://youtu.be/lFeyIEYRusc]

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IEEE Spectrum highlights Sanghamitra Neogi's atomic AI research

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 18:24:52 +0000

IEEE Spectrum highlights Sanghamitra Neogi's atomic AI research Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/06/2021 - 12:24

Physicists love recreating the world in software. A simulation lets you explore many versions of reality to find patterns or to test possibilities. But if you want one that’s realistic down to individual atoms and electrons, you run out of computing juice pretty quickly.

Machine-learning models can approximate detailed simulations, but often require lots of expensive training data.

A new method shows that physicists can lend their expertise to machine-learning algorithms, helping them train on a few small simulations consisting of a few atoms, then predict the behavior of system with hundreds of atoms. In the future, similar techniques might even characterize microchips with billions of atoms, predicting failures before they occur.

The researchers started with simulated units of 16 silicon and germanium atoms, two elements often used to make microchips. They employed high-performance computers to calculate the quantum-mechanical interactions between the atoms’ electrons.

Given a certain arrangement of atoms, the simulation generated unit-level characteristics such as its energy bands, the energy levels available to its electrons. But “you realize that there is a big gap between the toy models that we can study using a first-principles approach and realistic structures,” says Sanghamitra Neogi, a physicist at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, and the paper’s senior author.

Read the full article at IEEE Spectrum

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AI may soon predict how electronics fail

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 16:56:13 +0000

AI may soon predict how electronics fail Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/24/2021 - 10:56

Think of them as master Lego builders, only at an atomic scale. Engineers at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder have taken a major step forward in combing advanced computer simulations with artificial intelligence to try to predict how electronics, like the transistors in your cell phone, will fail.

The new research was led by physicist and aerospace engineer Sanghamitra Neogi and appears this week in the journal npj Computational Materials.

Sanghamitra Neogi

In their latest study, Neogi and her colleagues mapped out the physics of small building blocks made up of atoms, then used machine learning techniques to estimate how larger structures created from those same building blocks might behave. It’s a bit like looking at a single Lego brick to try to predict the strength of a much larger castle.

“We’re trying to understand the physics of devices with billions of atoms,” said Neogi, assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

It’s a pursuit that could be a boon for the electronics that underpin our daily lives, from smartphones and electric cars to emerging quantum computers. One day, Neogi said, engineers could use the team’s methods to pinpoint in advance weak points in the design of electronic components.

The project is part of Neogi’s larger focus on how the world of very small things, such as the wiggling of atoms, can help people build new and more efficient computers—even ones that take their inspiration from human brains. Artem Pimachev, a research associate in aerospace engineering at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, is a coauthor of the new study.

“Rather than wait for years to figure out why devices fail, our methods can give us a priori knowledge on how a device is going to work before we even build it,” Neogi said.

Heating up

Her latest research focuses on a big sticking point in the electronics industry: Hotspots.

And, no, that doesn’t mean the mobile WiFi hookups. Neogi explained that most modern computing tools carry a large number of imperfections––small defects in electronic components that cause heat to build up at certain sites, a bit like how a bicycle slows down when you ride over rough terrain. Such “hotspots” also make your smartphone a lot less efficient.

The problem, Neogi said, is that engineers drawing on computer simulations, or models, struggle to predict ahead of time where those weak points are likely to turn up.

“We can use physics models to understand systems with approximately 100 atoms in them,” Neogi said. “But that doesn’t compare to the billions of atoms in these devices.”

She thinks that machine intelligence can help engineers to design better electronics.

From atoms to devices

Think back to those individual Lego bricks, which, in this case, are clumps of 16 silicon and germanium atoms, the main ingredients in many computer components.

In the new study, Neogi and her colleagues developed a computer model that uses artificial intelligence to learn the physical properties within those building blocks—or how atoms and electrons come together to determine the energy landscape within a material. The model can then extrapolate from those basic blocks to estimate the distribution of energy in a much larger chunk of atoms.

“It collects information from each individual unit and combines them to predict the final properties of the collective system, which can be made up of two, three or more units,” Neogi said.

Her team still has a long way to go before it can pinpoint all of the potential weak points in a device the size of your phone. But, so far, the group’s model has proved effective. Neogi and her colleagues have used the tool to accurately predict the properties of several real-world materials made from silicon and germanium.

The researcher is also drawing on her understanding of how heat and energy flow at very small scales to not just improve existing devices, but also help create the devices of future. In 2019, Neogi joined a $1.7 million national effort to explore the potential for “neuromorphic” computers––or devices that store and analyze information by mimicking the activity of neurons in the brain.

“What I want to do is poke at this world of atoms in your handheld device and understand how materials and electronics come together to make a device work,” she said.

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Nanostructure research reveals new ways to direct heat flow in tech devices

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 21:20:51 +0000

Nanostructure research reveals new ways to direct heat flow in tech devices Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/05/2021 - 14:20

New findings from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researchers in Physical Review Applied show that nanoscale structures on the surfaces of silicon membranes can significantly change the way that heat travels through the bulk of the membrane. This work could make existing devices that operate through silicon and other semiconductors – like cell phones or wearable data processing devices – more efficient or even enable new technologies altogether.

Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Assistant Professor Sanghamitra Neogi led the work at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, which was published in August. Her lab aims to predict the performance of devices by bridging atomic scale physics of materials and device functionality, using a combination of theory, computer simulation and machine learning techniques. Their goal is to try and understand how electronic and thermal transport occur in materials that are used in many technologies. She said this research was particularly exciting for her lab group.

“We have found that building nanostructures – extremely small structures – like fins on the surfaces of silicon membranes can significantly change the way that heat travels through them,” she said. “More specifically for this work, we have shown that nanostructures can influence phonons – small units of vibrations responsible for conduction of heat in semiconductors. This makes it difficult for them to travel or possibly even encourages them to travel along certain paths rather than others. Our research exposes fundamentally new aspect about the heat carriers in materials and ways to control them.”

Neogi said this ability is important because many of the technologies we rely on every day like cell phones, laptops, and the chargers that keep them working are based on silicon and other semiconductors. Being able to control heat in these materials on such small scales would then allow for the creation of new technologies that also require well-regulated temperatures while simultaneously providing a way to make existing devices more efficient.

Morgan Henderson, a PhD student in Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is managing follow-up work on the project, which was done in partnership with University of California Davis. He said there are several interesting questions still to explore.

“One thing we will be looking at is, what level of control over phonon populations and their dynamics can nanoscale engineering actually provide?” he said. “And to develop a microscopic theory that can be used to describe all of the multiple phonon transport (crystalline or glass-like) regimes and related phenomena observed in nanostructured materials. That is especially compelling, as a unified model would provide greater understanding of phonon processes and reveal solutions to control the heat conduction properties of technology enabling materials.”

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Developing phononic neuromorphic materials to make computers that think like the human brain

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 19:07:25 +0000

Developing phononic neuromorphic materials to make computers that think like the human brain Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/23/2019 - 13:07

Jeff Zehnder

What is Ideas Lab?

Ideas Lab is a National Science Foundation initiative that aims to solve big, grand challenge-style problems using diverse research prospectives.

How does it work? In short, NSF brings together a group of 20-30 researchers who typically do not know each other and essentially puts them in a room for a week with the directive to work as a group to take on a big science or engineering problem.

In Neogi’s case, there was a prompt to work on computing issues tied to “Harnessing the Data Revolution.”

By the last day of the workshop, attendees were expected to have a general research plan and funding proposal to submit to NSF.

The concept of Ideas Lab originated in England, where the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), a British equivalent of the United States-based NSF, sent out a standard request for research funding proposals.

They felt the responses were not ambitious enough, and developed what they called a “Sandpit” workshop in response.

The goal is that by bringing researchers from diverse subject areas together, they will share ideas, interact and argue, and think of new solutions to problems no one researcher would come up with on their own.

Sanghamitra Neogi is part of a team seeking nothing less than a revolutionary leap forward in computing technology by making computers work more like the human brain.

The National Science Foundation thinks they may be onto something and has awarded a two-year, $1.7 million "Ideas Lab" grant to further the research.

Investigations into so-called neuromorphic materials have long been a target of scientists and engineers. The brain is essentially the fastest, most resilient computer ever made, and it has a near limitless capacity.

But it operates on entirely different principles than silicon computer chips. First and foremost, computers are electronic, while neurons in the brain are chemically activated. In addition, computer chips typically have assigned roles, and one component may not interact with another component at all, while the brain is a giant interconnected system.

Thinking Systems

“Computer chips on a circuit board don't directly communicate with each other the way neurons in the brain do,” said Neogi, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

Neogi is focused on phonons, which exist in all solid and liquid materials. They are quantum particles – incredibly small – carrying heat or vibration. Controlling phonons, especially high-frequency (10¹²/seconds) phonons, is still a relatively new research area, with most work focusing on using them to better manage heat in electronic or thermoelectric devices.

Where does this get back to the human brain? While computer chips may not directly communicate with each other, both neurons and phonons do.

The question is if they are similar enough that phonons could be used like neurons: to store and process information.

Phonons and Neurons

Preliminary work suggests they can. To further the research, the team is composed of an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers working in the fields of materials, data science, neurology, chemistry, physics, and biological engineering at five institutions: ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University and the University of California San Diego.

The grant officially begins on October 1. Working with Neogi at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder are aerospace PhD student Morgan Henderson and Kyle Li, an undergraduate in engineering plus and applied math.

Key ideas behind this research were initiated during Neogi’s prior work on a $1 million DARPA grant to investigate phonon and electron properties of heterogenerous semiconductor architectures.

One tricky question is the interconnection of neurons. MRI scans of humans show that when we think of a memory, large areas of the brain light up, meaning many neurons are activating as a group. For the team to be successful, phonons will need to function the same way.

However, the incredible complexity of the brain has led most researchers to focus on individual neurons. For this project, the team has to do that and also map the collective dynamics of entire networks of neurons.

“What we want to do, and this is kind of crazy, is not look at one neuron, but look at millions or the entire brain,” Neogi said.

It is the type of issue the NSF Ideas Lab program is focused on: big risk, big reward problems. Scientists and engineers are increasingly approaching the upper limit of computing speeds with currently available technology architectures. This research could change that equation and lead to significantly faster processors and storage possibilities.

“One of NSF’s 10 big ideas is harnessing the data revolution,” Neogi said. “This project maximizes our opportunities for disruptive new computing and data science concepts.”

Sanghamitra Neogi is part of a team seeking nothing less than a revolutionary leap forward in computing technology by making computers work more like the human brain. The National Science Foundation thinks they may be onto something and has awarded a two-year, $1.7 million "Ideas Lab" grant to further the research. Investigations into...

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Seminar: Phonon and Electron Transport in Nanostructured Semiconductors: A Perspective for Aerospace Applications - Oct. 10

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 21:11:33 +0000

Seminar: Phonon and Electron Transport in Nanostructured Semiconductors: A Perspective for Aerospace Applications - Oct. 10 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/05/2018 - 15:11

Sanghamitra Neogi - Assistant Professor, Smead Aerospace
Wed. Oct. 10, 2018 | DLC | 12:00 pm
Download Flyer

Abstract: Heat conduction in macroscopic continuum media is well described by classical physics. However, with continued miniaturization of electronic transistors, sensors and actuators, device dimensions are now reaching the nanoscale. Classical framework fails to explain heat conduction in nanoscale materials.

It is imperative to take into account the atomistic nature of matter, effects of confinement and dimensionality, and the interaction of lattice vibrations with electrons and photons, to analyze nanoscale heat transport. Quantized lattice vibrations, phonons, provide a natural framework to describe heat transport in nanoscale materials. In semiconductors, heat is primarily transported by broadband high-frequency THz phonons with nanometer wavelengths. Therefore, a broad range of phonon frequencies needs to be engineered to control heat conduction, in contrast with electronic applications, where only energies close to the Fermi level are relevant. The difficulty of working with a broad spectrum of excitations naturally poses major challenges in achieving control over nanoscale phonon transport.

Engineered nanoscale features have shown remarkable possibilities to manipulate phonons and thus guide heat in nanostructures. Efforts to control phonons, especially at the micro- and nanoscale, have been further stimulated by the ever increasing roles that phonons assume via self-interaction and interaction with electrons, photons and other fundamental quantum particles. My research program at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ boulder is focused around the central theme—to tune phonons and their interactions with other quantum particles via engineering of nanostructured materials—in order to enable a broad range of technological applications. Our aim is to devise structural engineering strategies to engender desired transport of quantum particles in materials.

In this seminar, I will present an overview of the research activities in my group, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modeling (ŷ��ڱ��ƵANTAM) Laboratory, in particular,

phonon and electron transport in multilayered nanostructured thermoelectric materials,
electron-phonon interaction in silicon/germanium heterostructures,
guiding heat in thin-film nanostructures with engineered surfaces,
prediction of charge transport in multilayered semiconductors using machine learning techniques, and,
probing spin-phonon interaction in defected semiconductors to enable quantum applications.

I will discuss illustrative strategies we devise to mitigate thermal constraints and overcome the limits of performance in complex aerospace electronic applications.

Bio: Sanghamitra Neogi is an Assistant Professor in the Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder since Fall 2015. Prior to joining ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, she received her Ph.D. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics from Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and was a postdoctoral research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany. Her research focuses on establishing structure-processing-property relationships in nanostructured materials, thermoelectric energy conversion, application of statistical learning methods to predict heat and charge transport in nanostructures, phonon engineering, and probing spin-phonon interaction in quantum systems.

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DARPA Grant for Nano-Sized Research Could Lead to Big Changes

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 17:52:29 +0000

DARPA Grant for Nano-Sized Research Could Lead to Big Changes Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/08/2016 - 10:52

Dead cell phones are the problem of the 21st-century. Walk into any coffee shop or airport and every outlet in sight will be plugged with chargers. However, what if you never had to worry about charging your phone again, because your charger was your own body heat.

It's a future that could become a reality through the work of University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Aerospace Engineering Sciences assistant professor Sanghamitra Neogi, who has received a $1,000,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity.

A New Take

"This is cutting-edge research," says Neogi, who is the single principle investigator for the grant. "Normally DARPA gives funding because they want a finished project, but this project is being done at a much earlier stage. It's high risk, but high gain."

Thermoelectric generators have been around a long time; NASA has used them for decades on space probes as a long-lived power source that can reliably convert heat into electricity without any moving parts.

The devices work using a principle discovered almost 200 years ago by German physicist Thomas Seebeck and French physicist Jean Peltier: when two different kinds of metal are joined in two places, forming a closed loop, and one junction has a higher temperature than the other, a small electric current will flow through the loop.

Unfortunately, they haven’t been widely adopted for public use because they are typically very expensive, inefficient, or worse, use materials that are toxic to humans.

“I’m looking at materials that are cheaper and non-toxic, silicon and germanium,” says Neogi.

Nano-Sized Research

Both are used extensively in the production of high-speed integrated circuits, solar panels, and other commercial and industrial applications, so they’re easy to find and inexpensive, but don't expect to see Neogi conducting experiments in a lab with test tubes and beakers. Her work is with a keyboard and mouse, using advanced computer models to evaluate what happens inside sandwiched layers of nanoscopic silicon and germanium.

“The current models always assume the layers are perfect, exactly like they’re supposed to be, but nothing is perfect. I’m trying to take the imperfections into account. How do those defects in the layers impact efficiency and what can we do about it?” Neogi says.

The research is extremely complex and requires a supercomputer to do the computations. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder has one, but it may not be enough to carry out all the work and Neogi recently acquired time on a National Science Foundation supercomputer in Texas as an additional resource.

What makes it so complicated?

Atomic, Subatomic, and Quantum Particles

"I’ll have 2,000,000 atoms, and I want to know what each one is doing after every time step," she says.

With the research at such a small size, it’s no surprise she's looking at equally tiny increments of time. Her time steps are in picoseconds, one trillionth of a second.

"I want to know the position, velocity, and force between these atoms for each time step, and I'm going to look at one million time steps," she says.

Tunneling down further, Neogi will also be investigating electrons and phonons, a quantum particle.

“If we can manipulate what happens between the layers, where the germanium and silicon interface with each other, it could change the way materials science works,” she says. "This is an area that's less understood. I'm fascinated by it.”

Future Possibilities

DARPA sees a variety of potential applications for the research. In addition to turning body heat into electricity, it could also lead to new solutions to the problem of excess heat generated by electronics – an issue easily recognized by anyone who has tried to actually use a laptop computer on their lap and ended up with burned thighs. If new thermoelectric devices could convert that heat into electricity, devices currently requiring large fans, vents, and heat sinks to reduce their high temperatures could be completely reimagined.

"We could fabricate novel devices with smaller size, weight, and power (SWaP) that will be broadly applicable," Neogi says. “That’s the long term goal.”

The three year grant runs through September 2019.

Find Out More ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Neogi's Research

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Sanghamitra Neogi News

Seminar - From Atoms to Devices: Designing Materials for Future Devices - Oct. 13

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ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research

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Faculty in Focus: Sanghamitra Neogi

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IEEE Spectrum highlights Sanghamitra Neogi's atomic AI research

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AI may soon predict how electronics fail

Heating up

From atoms to devices

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Nanostructure research reveals new ways to direct heat flow in tech devices

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Developing phononic neuromorphic materials to make computers that think like the human brain

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Seminar: Phonon and Electron Transport in Nanostructured Semiconductors: A Perspective for Aerospace Applications - Oct. 10

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DARPA Grant for Nano-Sized Research Could Lead to Big Changes

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research