THE SUCCESS OF PENN STATE AS A LEADER IN THE RESEARCHING AND ENGINEERING OF MATERIALS AND DEVICES HAS ENABLED THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A ROBUST RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE THROUGH SHARED FACILITIES MANAGED BY THE MATERIALS RESEARCH INSTITUTE (MRI).
Most of these facilities are centrally housed in the 275,600 square-foot Millennium Science Complex at University Park where an entire wing of the building is dedicated to materials research. These facilities include the: 2D Crystal Consortium, Nanofabrication Laboratory, and Materials Characterization Laboratory.
NSF 2D Crystal Consortium Materials Innovation Platform (2DCC-MIP)
The 2DCC operates as a national resource providing access and expertise in 2D chalcogenide layered materials in the form of bulk crystal, multilayers, and one-atom thick films. It enables cutting edge research into next-generation 2D electronics and collaborates with microelectronics manufacturing companies.
Nanofabrication Laboratory (Nanofab)
The Nanofabrication Lab provides access to state-of-the-art nanofabrication capabilities and expertise to researchers from academia, industry, and federal research labs. The technical staff is focused on maintaining the facilities and providing guidance and training to the users. In addition to its nanofabrication expertise, the staff has broad experience in condensed-matter physics, chemistry, X-ray physics, optics, and magnetism, offering a broad knowledge base to support the user community. The Laboratory is currently developing sophisticated packaging processes for 2D and quantum materials compatible with large volume semiconductor device manufacturing. The facility has a long tradition of teaching semiconductor processes to undergraduate and graduate students, and it works closely with industry in developing processes compatible with technology transfer.
Materials Characterization Laboratory (MCL)
The MCL is a fully staffed, open access facility providing access to characterization equipment for materials and devices to enable advanced research while educating the next generation of highly qualified scientists and researchers. The MCL laboratories occupy more than 15,000 square feet within the Millennium Science Complex (MSC) at Penn State and are staffed by interdisciplinary scientists and engineers. Current MCL state of the art capabilities include transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron and ion microscopy, surface characterization, X-ray scattering, molecular spectroscopy, thermal analysis, particle characterization, electrical characterization, and mechanical testing.
Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS)
The ICDS interdisciplinary institute at Penn State supports big data and big simulation methods for the research community. In support of the semiconductor research ICDS has a number of strategic efforts under its artificial intelligence (AI) Hub. The HPC infrastructure maintained by ICDS and its highly qualified staff also enable the handling of large data sets arising from detailed synthesis monitoring, and complex device designs that increasingly need hierarchical spatial and time analytics in their simulations.