The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in American supply chain logistics, especially regarding semiconductor chips, which are the foundation for modern technology and essential to future innovations. In 2020, the United States manufactured just 10% of the world’s total supply of semiconductors, a significant decrease from 1990 when America produced 37% of these chips.
American economic growth, national security, and global competitiveness are tightly linked to semiconductor technology, fostering bipartisan support to enact the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. This legislation is aimed at increasing research and development of critical semiconductor technologies and revitalizing the domestic manufacturing of these chips. The CHIPS Act is expected to boost America’s manufacture of these advanced chips to almost 30% of the world’s total supply by 2032.
Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, assistant professor (ENG; ECE, BME) and a faculty affiliate of the BU Center for Information & Systems Engineering and Hariri Institute, will be helping advance wireless capabilities on a $6M first-year grant awarded by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub (NEMC), a regional research hub established through the CHIPS Act. She will collaborate on the project with academic researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell and industry partners Sivers Semiconductors, Ericsson, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon Technologies. As a large-scale initiative led by Sivers Semiconductors, the grant supports the development and potential domestic manufacturing of these cutting-edge chips, with renewable funding available for up to three years to support continued innovation.
This project aims to develop US capabilities in wireless communications with applications spanning Internet of Things (IoT) devices, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and mobile communication. 5G and upcoming 6G networks enable wireless communication to be high-speed, ultra-reliable, and low-latency, which means shorter delays in network communication. The NEMC grant focuses on enhancing 5G and 6G technologies through scalable wideband transceiver systems that can handle multiple input and output signals simultaneously (MIMO), antennas that are operational over a broad frequency range, advanced front-end components for incoming signals, and innovative universal decoders for interpreting the data.
For the project, Yazicigil and collaborators from MIT and Northeastern University will build on their previous work on the award-winning multi-institutional Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) project. GRAND presents an innovative noise-centric decoding approach to maintaining reliable and secure wireless communication at a faster speed and lower energy consumption.
When information is sent wirelessly, noise during transmission can alter the data so the receiver gets a corrupted message. Decoder chips protect the accuracy of the information being transmitted through error detection and correction on the receiver side. However, existing decoder chips are tightly coupled to specific code structures, restricting their versatility and broader applicability. GRAND is a first-of-its-kind decoder chip because it can be used universally as a code-agnostic data decoding approach in wireless communications.
Yazicigil, whose expertise is in integrated circuits and system design for energy-constrained applications, develops the energy-efficient and low-latency semiconductor chips for data decoding leveraging the GRAND algorithmic family. “This novel decoding approach enables low-latency, energy-efficient, and secure wireless communications in a manner that is future-proof, since it is adaptable to any coding scheme. By focusing on a noise-centric decoder, this innovation positions the United States to advance beyond current paired code-decoder technologies and regain its standing in wireless communication, a field where its historic leadership has recently waned,” Yazicigil says.
The GRAND project is a close collaboration with co-PIs, Muriel Medard, MIT NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Ken Duffy, Northeastern Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mathematics.
Learn more about the NEMC’s inaugural projects here.