Under this grant, entitled "New Computational Paradigms for Large-scale ab-initio Simulations of Emerging Electronic Materials and Devices," Polizzi will employ mathematical modeling techniques and high-performance parallel computing to perform large-scale simulations of the atomistic structure and properties of nanoelectronic systems. A suite of software tools will enable the prototyping of new materials and electronic devices, which will significantly increase the speed of device design and modeling. This software environment, NESSIE, will be made publicly available.
Computational tools are becoming critically important to the advancement of the nanoelectronics industry, which is reaching the limits of scale possible through miniaturization. Simulation is a flexible and less-expensive supplement to physical experimentation and can produce detailed and realistic data based on the knowledge of existing system components.