One of the research strengths of the University of Delaware fits in well with the CHIPS and Science Act – photonic integrated circuits.
“We have a history here at Delaware with optoelectronic devices and integrated photonics on silicon and other platforms,” said Jamie Phillips, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware. “One of our key faculty members, Dennis Prather, is an expert in thin film lithium niobate. We have one of the only sources of thin film lithium niobate domestically in the US, which is an enabling technology for photonics on a chip. He co-founded a company, Phase Sensitive Innovations, that has commercialized that technology.”
Other strengths at Delaware include a user facility for epitaxial growth, emerging research in the field of quantum science and technology, and on the educational side, a new multidisciplinary quantum science and engineering graduate program that would feed into CHIPs Act-related semiconductor activities. Phillips sees partnerships among universities as key because of important factors such as redundancy of facilities, where a partner can offer their facility to another partner in the case of something such as a clean room issue or equipment failure. They can also work together to incubate startup companies and offer their facilities to these new-born entities.
“It’s very difficult and prohibitively expensive to establish a cleanroom facility on your own but being able to take advantage of an open nanofab that they can use to develop their products is critical for further innovation and new technologies,”
Phillips said. For a potential Mid-Atlantic university partnership for semiconductor research and development, Phillips sees a synergistic relationship where partners with complementary strengths would be able to create new centers where faculty from various semiconductor subcategories would be able to combine expertise and resources to create some- thing bigger.
“I think there are some really powerful selling points in enabling, say a Mid-Atlantic, New York to Washington, DC type of a research hub,” Phillips said. “We would have a geographical advantage given all the universities and other entities around us, particularly in the defense sector.”