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Materials Research Project

Electronic Microstructures
Microstructures

We have limited performance of natural materials which cannot meet the requirement of new generations of electronics.

A solution is provided by engineering microstructured materials, whose properties are dictated by the microstructure, i.e., the geometries, sizes, shapes and their distributions of individual phases in the overall structure.

New theoretical and numerical methods have been developed to give explicit designs for desired materials properties and field properties in physical settings including thermal, electric, magnetic and elastic. Left figures show designs of optimal periodic (cellular) composites. These 2D and 3D microstructures maximize (or minimize) the effective properties of the composites, e.g., the dielectric constants or the electric and thermal conductivity of the composites.

Such optimal composite materials shall be of interest to TI for, e.g., high-k dielectric materials and materials for thermal management; middle figure show a design of shield (the shell region between the black circles) that can shied electromagnetic fields with shielding factor up to 1 million (the field strength is the core is only 1 ppm of the field strength in the exterior region). These shields may be used to protect highly electromagnetic sensitive components in the devices; the right figures show designs of magnets that give rise to precise quadrupole and sextupole magnetic fields (Blue regions have magnetization pointing up; red regions point down). Such magnetic fields are important for syncrytrons which are nowadays an indispensable tool for semiconductor materials analysis.