FIU College of Engineering and Computing

The FIU Electrical and Computer Engineering department is now a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (STC) for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S).

The Center is a consortium of world class academic institutions including UC-Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, UT-El Paso, and FIU. The Center’s researchers are working in a collaborative and innovative environment to make fundamental and conceptual breakthroughs in the underlying physics, chemistry, and materials science of electronic systems, breakthroughs needed to reduce these systems’ energy consumption by orders of magnitude.

The role of FIU ECE faculty and students, led by Professor Sakhrat Khizroev, is to study the new physics underlying magnetic spin switching in sub-10-nm spin-transfer-torque (STT) magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJs). Nanomagnetic STT MTJs offer the promise of a universal memory that combines the density advantage of DRAM, the speed advantage of SRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash. These new nanodevices can also enable non-volatile logic with near zero static power consumption, meeting a key challenge in further scaling of CMOS devices.

Involvement in this leading academic center provides a unique opportunity for FIU ECE to showcase its groundbreaking research in in the rapidly emerging important cross-disciplinary field of energy-efficient information processing, beyond Moore’s Law.