ACCELERATING
MATERIALS-TO-DEVICES
CYCLE
It can take 20 years between the creation of a new material in the lab and the fabrication of next-generation consumer electronic devices that employ the material.
Thanks to a $1.5 million NSF cyber-infrastructure grant, University of Illinois researchers
are working to speed up the technology transfer process by up to 50 percent.
The Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program will transform materials-todevice processes by creating new data infrastructure that would enable researchers to
better collect, curate and correlate scientific data generated during material creation and
device fabrication processes. Illinois researchers are collecting and curating digital data
from selected materials-making / characterization and device-fabrication instruments
at MNTL and the Materials Research Lab on campus. Co-principal investigators include
Materials Science & Engineering Director John Rogers and MNTL Director Brian
Cunningham.
“We have scientists who are producing cutting-edge materials accompanied by enormous
amounts of digital data from high-end instruments, and then writing down results in a notebook or storing them on local disks. Only the most interesting results are published, while
others get deleted or stored in a drawer for 10 years,” said Computer Science Professor
Klara Narhstedt, the principal investigator of the grant and director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL). “Our goal with the NSF DIBBs grant is to make sure this innovative
research is not only preserved, but that it’s also easy for other scientists, such as circuit and
device builders, to access and build upon their work.”
MNTL HIGHLIGHTS REPORT
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