C2S2 Mission

How will we design successful circuits from the increasingly ill-behaved silicon devices that result as we scale toward fundamental atomic limits? And what might tomorrow’s circuits look like as promising post-silicon technologies start to come on line? This is C2S2’s mission: figuring out how to convert tomorrow’s transistors into useful performance, no matter how strange they might be.

In support of this overall mission, C2S2 researchers work in three fundamental areas:

C2S2 Organization

C2S2 is a consortium of 19 US universities, chartered by the US semiconductor industry and US government to address challenges in next-generation circuit design posed by scaling toward ultimate silicon physical limits. Carnegie Mellon University is the lead school for the center. C2S2 currently comprises roughly 50 faculty and 80 graduate students. Additional information about the C2S2 executive and research teams teams can be found here. Information about FCRP, our parent organization is here. Information about our industrial and government sponsors is here.

C2S2 Research Themes

Research tasks in C2S2 are partitioned across five research themes, shown below on three axes. The axes— Analog, Digital, Applications— represent a high-level partition of work into a few essential areas: analog and digital circuits; higher-level application-specific systems, and applications that target radical markets or post-silicon devices.

The research themes are:

• Silicon Infrastructure: Models, statistics, circuit-oriented design and analysis and test tools, on-chip diagnosis and adaptation circuits, and novel manufacturable circuit fabrics.
• Digital Circuits and Systems: Memory, logic and on-chip communication circuits, designed in aggressively scaled technologies, targeting extreme performance, power, and reliability goals.
• Analog Circuits and Interfaces: Analog, RF and mm-wave circuits, converter and communication circuits, with an emphasis on “mostly digital” architectures using scaled digital devices, and very high performance applications.
• Microarchitecture: Targets the unique problems of performance, power, and reliability posed by leading-edge microprocessor circuits and systems.
• Emerging Circuits and Applications: Targets new application domains that may lead to novel markets for future electronics (e.g., biological interfaces) and hybrid circuits that augment today’s silicon platform with promising future device types (eg., nanotube and graphene devices).

In addition, we also have two center-wide design drivers which integrate efforts from researchers across the different themes. Our two current drivers are:

• SRAM Circuits: Focusing on the unique problems of design, optimization, reliability and yield for these critical circuits at highly scaled CMOS nodes.
• Millimeter Wave Imaging: Focusing on the unique opportunities in analog circuit operating in scaled silicon technologies at 100GHz and beyond.