Program Management and Time Line

Nano-Tera.CH can only reach its ambitious goals, if synergies between the different technologies are exploited and engineering research towards system-integration is performed. Besides excel on the usual criteria of success such as international visibility, leadership in individual technology areas, presence in major conferences and scientific journals and technology transfer to industry, it is of utmost importance to achieve a high level of integration. This does not only concern the combination of various technologies into viable systems but involves a full reinforcing cycle involving new constraints, ideas and  requirements from system integration and new models, methods and components from technology research. In addition, it is a major goal of Nano-Tera.CH to build a strong community among the currently widely spread research activities in the area of Nano-Tera.CH in Switzerland and make this visible through various activities such as joint research projects and joint program in education. The key elements are a network of collaboration between Federal, Cantonal and Technical Universities and Swiss Research Centers, as well as an active link with Swiss industrial partners.

The operation of Nano-Tera.CH will be structured to support these goals:

• Individual projects typically will be comprised of more than one research team from different locations. This is the first level of interaction between research teams.
• Projects that relate well in terms of expertise and complementary knowledge will be grouped into clusters. This second level of interaction facilitates the scientific and financial monitoring of the research and provides means to animate intra- and inter-cluster cooperation. Projects related to application scenarios will be part of the clusters as they drive the technology development.
• We expect a number of important interactions to take place among projects in the different clusters. They will be animated using organization of cross-institutional workshops and summer schools, postgraduate and continuous education as well as student exchange.

There will be mechanisms in place to monitor the scientific progress of projects and their integration into the whole Nano-Tera.CH program. Appropriate procedures need to be developed that allow for the termination of research projects that are not satisfying the success criteria of Nano-Tera.CH.

Besides the aforementioned structural mechanisms to promote the integration of the various projects, the basic time line and the corresponding milestones of Nano-Tera.CH will further strengthen the cooperation between the different research groups and institutions.

Time Line

We do not intend to partition the time line of the project into phases that correspond to the workflow as described. In this case, system integration research and the corresponding basic technologies such as scalable software and hardware would be shifted towards the end of the project. Instead, at all times all components of the workflow are present all the time, such as nano and hybrid technologies including the corresponding abstraction and modeling techniques, micro- and nano technologies, systems and services including hardware platforms and scalable software.

According to the following Figure 3, the timeline is characterized by a continuous progress in all of these areas, starting at early trials using existing technologies from the participating research groups via prototype models, methods, tools and implementations towards complex demonstrators of the developed technologies and their integration. Examples of these demonstrators are described.

Figure 3: Integration of activities and time line of the Nano-Tera.CH program

To be successful, the project is staggered with system integration methods and technologies of various maturities. We can broadly classify technologies as being available in the short, medium, and long term. Examples, include, but are not limited to, silicon devices in the 20-50 nm range, carbon nanotubes and quantum coherent devices respectively. We intend to pursue research in a diversified basket of technologies that include the classes defined above. We intentionally consider a distribution of projects across this class that privileges those technologies that are available or will be available in the short term to support tera-scale design. Nevertheless, we will be forward looking to upcoming technologies and be particularly attentive to commonalities.

Thus, we envision projects starting with state of the art computational nanotechnology in silicon, explore the hybridization with sensors, and provide hardware support to software and communication systems. At the same time, we envision the development of medium-term technologies, such as crossbars functionalized with molecular electronics or nanotubes. While we face the technological challenges of their effective fabrication, we will explore issues such as parallelism, redundancy and dependability. We will also spend a limited effort in looking at long-term technologies, such as quantum coherent devices, with particular attention to those applications, which can have impact on security, such as quantum cryptography.

At the same time, in parallel and in close interaction with these technological developments, system-related research and concrete application studies will be conducted. We will provide then an abstraction layer to develop software and platforms for large-scale distributed information processing systems. For example, principles of self-organization, hardware and software dependability and resource awareness on the system level will be of great importance.

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