The goal of the Center for Harsh Environment Semiconductor and Systems (CHESS) is to apply cutting-edge science and technology to enable novel devices and supporting electronics needed for harsh environment that will have a direct impact on the security, industrial, and medical areas while educating a diverse workforce.
Mission
The ultimate goal of CHESS is to generate an unprecedented transformative science and technology to enable novel devices and supporting electronics needed for harsh environment that will have a direct impact on the security, industrial, and medical areas while educating a diverse workforce.
The center brings together physicists, chemists, materials scientist, bioengineers and engineers from UT Dallas to take advantage of the uniquely developed infrastructure and academics of UT Dallas and its collaborators.
North Texas Semiconductor Institute
Why Harsh Environments?
Ask CEOs of a collection of Fortune 100 technology companies what the most important engineering challenge their company faces today is and the answer you will get is likely to distill to one concept: System Reliability, and specifically reliability under harsh environments including high temperature, radiation, and vibration. Reliable systems that work under harsh environments may not sound as important as performance and functionality, but reliable systems save lives. Furthermore, the cascade of complex systems emerging today that operate under harsh conditions will necessitate a new approach to reliability assessment. When the systems work, they are game-changing. When they do not work, catastrophe can ensue. With the development of the commercial space sector, fully-autonomous vehicles, smart-city infrastructure, the internet-of-things, complex implantable medical electronics, artificial intelligence, burgeoning cyber-security concerns, demand for high-reliability and quality of highly-interrelated systems working in harsh conditions is expected to continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Other challenges include the increasing system complexity and machine autonomy that require a new level of component and system reliability and quality that is not possible with the current tools. Materials and device designs change so quickly that we do not have the luxury of taking many years to develop failure models. The chemistry/physics-based models need to be developed in the early technology phases, long before the technology is put into the field, especially in applications where human life is impacted.
To address these issues The center for harsh environment semiconductors and systems brings together preeminent experts in fields spanning device and circuit modelling to systems and AI to create an ecosystem that will have not only a profound scientific and technological impact, but also will nurture unique faculty collaborations and opportunities for multidisciplinary education not available otherwise. The goal of our center is to create a comprehensive theory and practice of reliability of materials under harsh environments based on sound principles of mathematics and physics, applied to electrical, mechanical, and electromechanical systems. This comprehensive theory and design for reliability approach, when put into practice will empower the nation to preserve our technological lead in this critical area, return jobs to our shores, and ultimately save lives across the globe.
Partners
