BETR Research Center
The goal of the BETR Center is to provide solutions for driving innovation in materials, processes and solid-state devices to enable future ubiquitous information systems. Research activities are motivated by the following three main challenges for ambient intelligence to become a reality.
Advent of AI and Ubiquitous Computing
The emerging era of ubiquitous computing with electronic devices being pervasive and wirelessly networked with access to cloud computing requires heterogeneous integration to diversify functionality and mechanical flexibility in mobile devices. For these to be affordable, new manufacturing techniques must be developed through interdisciplinary research into novel tools, processes, and materials.
Looming Power Crisis for Computing
Electricity consumed by computing devices has increased exponentially with the proliferation of machine learning and communication technologies. To avoid a power crisis for future computing, fundamentally new concepts for more energy-efficient logic switches and on-chip communication are needed, including new device structures, innovations in circuit design, and novel architectures in system integration.
Proliferation of Big Data Applications
“Big Data” has become the main driver for advances in memory technology and high-performance computing with increasing need for storing and processing large data sets on-chip and in real-time to derive actionable information. Hardware innovations (including logic-in-memory and non-von-Neumann architectures) and new computational algorithms will be needed to meet increasing energy and cost constraints.
BETR Center Research Thrusts
Finding solutions to these grand challenges requires a concerted effort across disciplines and between academic and industrial researchers. In response, the BETR Center assembled a diverse group of UC Berkeley professors from electrical engineering, computer science and materials science, working with industry researchers, to build the technological foundation for future electronic devices and information systems. The BETR Center research teams are organized in six distinct, but highly collaborative, research thrusts:
Next-generation, high-performance and energy-efficient electronic devices and circuits, as well as on-chip integration for energy-efficient and low-latency logic and memory.
Novel manufacturing and deployment paradigms for flexible, wearable, and interactive information devices for health care, agriculture, and environmental applications.
New hardware architectures and integrated systems to address the explosively growing energy and performance demands from artificial intelligence applications.
Integrated quantum devices and silicon photonics to gain new insights into quantum transduction and the dynamics and coherence of qubits in nanoscale architectures.
Silicon photonics technology for fast and energy-efficient on/across-chip data transfer and processing as well as for high-speed communication between servers within data centers.
Innovations in materials design through novel synthesis and processing methods, as well as metrology through the co-design of hardware and software in computational imaging.