In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

MIT.nano has announced that Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

“With an international perspective on the world’s energy challenges, Shell is an exciting addition to the MIT.nano Consortium,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “The quest to build a sustainable energy future will require creative thinking backed by broad and deep expertise that our Shell colleagues bring. They will be insightful collaborators for the MIT community and for our member companies as we work together to explore innovative technology strategies.”

Founded in 1907 when Shell Transport and Trading Co. merged with Royal Dutch, Shell has more than a century’s worth of experience in the exploration, production, refining, and marketing of oil and natural gas and the manufacturing and marketing of chemicals. Operating in over 70 countries, Shell has set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. To achieve this, Shell is supporting developments of low-carbon energy solutions such as biofuels, hydrogen, charging for electric vehicles, and electricity generated by solar and wind power.

“In line with our Powering Progress strategy, our research efforts to become a net-zero emission energy company by 2050 will require intense collaboration with academic leaders across a wide range of disciplines,” says Rolf van Benthem, Shell’s chief scientist for materials science. “We look forward to engaging with the top-notch PIs [principal investigators] at MIT.nano who excel in fields like materials design and nanoscale characterization for use in energy applications and carbon utilization. Together we can work on truly sustainable solutions for our society.”

Shell has been engaged in research collaborations with MIT since 2002 and is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Recent MIT projects supported by Shell include an urban building energy model with the MIT Sustainable Design Laboratory that explores energy-saving building retrofits, a study of the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways with MITEI, and a materials science and engineering project to design better batteries for electric vehicles.

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, Shell will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices;
• Draper;
• Edwards;
• Fujikura;
• IBM Research;
• Lam Research;
• NC;
• NEC;
• Raith;
• UpNano; and
• Viavi Solutions.

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of MIT.nano.

In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.

The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).

“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”

A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.

Finding inspiration in the archives

The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).

Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”

Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.

Incorporating MIT nerdiness

Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.

The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.

“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.

To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.

“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.

Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.

The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names. 

Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names

In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.

Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.

“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”

Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”

Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman '11 and Eboney Hearn '01, who is also the executive director of MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering and Science (MITES).

© Photo: Ken Richardson

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

MIT.nano has announced that Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

“With an international perspective on the world’s energy challenges, Shell is an exciting addition to the MIT.nano Consortium,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “The quest to build a sustainable energy future will require creative thinking backed by broad and deep expertise that our Shell colleagues bring. They will be insightful collaborators for the MIT community and for our member companies as we work together to explore innovative technology strategies.”

Founded in 1907 when Shell Transport and Trading Co. merged with Royal Dutch, Shell has more than a century’s worth of experience in the exploration, production, refining, and marketing of oil and natural gas and the manufacturing and marketing of chemicals. Operating in over 70 countries, Shell has set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. To achieve this, Shell is supporting developments of low-carbon energy solutions such as biofuels, hydrogen, charging for electric vehicles, and electricity generated by solar and wind power.

“In line with our Powering Progress strategy, our research efforts to become a net-zero emission energy company by 2050 will require intense collaboration with academic leaders across a wide range of disciplines,” says Rolf van Benthem, Shell’s chief scientist for materials science. “We look forward to engaging with the top-notch PIs [principal investigators] at MIT.nano who excel in fields like materials design and nanoscale characterization for use in energy applications and carbon utilization. Together we can work on truly sustainable solutions for our society.”

Shell has been engaged in research collaborations with MIT since 2002 and is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Recent MIT projects supported by Shell include an urban building energy model with the MIT Sustainable Design Laboratory that explores energy-saving building retrofits, a study of the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways with MITEI, and a materials science and engineering project to design better batteries for electric vehicles.

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, Shell will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices;
• Draper;
• Edwards;
• Fujikura;
• IBM Research;
• Lam Research;
• NC;
• NEC;
• Raith;
• UpNano; and
• Viavi Solutions.

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of MIT.nano.

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

MIT.nano has announced that Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

“With an international perspective on the world’s energy challenges, Shell is an exciting addition to the MIT.nano Consortium,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “The quest to build a sustainable energy future will require creative thinking backed by broad and deep expertise that our Shell colleagues bring. They will be insightful collaborators for the MIT community and for our member companies as we work together to explore innovative technology strategies.”

Founded in 1907 when Shell Transport and Trading Co. merged with Royal Dutch, Shell has more than a century’s worth of experience in the exploration, production, refining, and marketing of oil and natural gas and the manufacturing and marketing of chemicals. Operating in over 70 countries, Shell has set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. To achieve this, Shell is supporting developments of low-carbon energy solutions such as biofuels, hydrogen, charging for electric vehicles, and electricity generated by solar and wind power.

“In line with our Powering Progress strategy, our research efforts to become a net-zero emission energy company by 2050 will require intense collaboration with academic leaders across a wide range of disciplines,” says Rolf van Benthem, Shell’s chief scientist for materials science. “We look forward to engaging with the top-notch PIs [principal investigators] at MIT.nano who excel in fields like materials design and nanoscale characterization for use in energy applications and carbon utilization. Together we can work on truly sustainable solutions for our society.”

Shell has been engaged in research collaborations with MIT since 2002 and is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Recent MIT projects supported by Shell include an urban building energy model with the MIT Sustainable Design Laboratory that explores energy-saving building retrofits, a study of the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways with MITEI, and a materials science and engineering project to design better batteries for electric vehicles.

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, Shell will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices;
• Draper;
• Edwards;
• Fujikura;
• IBM Research;
• Lam Research;
• NC;
• NEC;
• Raith;
• UpNano; and
• Viavi Solutions.

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of MIT.nano.

“How do we get to making nanomaterials that haven’t been evolved before?” asked Angela Belcher at the 2023 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 20. “We can use elements that biology has already given us.”

The combined in-person and virtual audience of over 300 was treated to a light-up, 3D model of M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only infects bacteria, complete with a pull-out strand of DNA. Belcher used the feather-boa-like model to show how her research group modifies the M13’s genes to add new DNA and peptide sequences to template inorganic materials.

“I love controlling materials at the nanoscale using biology,” said Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, materials science professor, and of the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “We all know if you control materials at the nanoscale and you can start to tune them, then you can have all kinds of different applications.” And the opportunities are indeed vast — from building batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells to carbon sequestration and storage, environmental remediation, catalysis, and medical diagnostics and imaging.

Belcher sprinkled her talk with models and props, lined up on a table at the front of the 10-250 lecture hall, to demonstrate a wide variety of concepts and projects made possible by the intersection of biology and nanotechnology.

Energy storage and environment

“How do you go from a DNA sequence to a functioning battery?” posed Belcher. Grabbing a model of a large carbon nanotube, she explained how her group engineered a phage to pick up carbon nanotubes that would wind all the way around the virus and then fill in with different cathode or anode materials to make nanowires for battery electrodes.

How about using the M13 bacteriophage to improve the environment? Belcher referred to a project by former student Geran Zhang PhD ’19 that proved the virus can be modified for this context, too. He used the phage to template high-surface-area, carbon-based materials that can grab small molecules and break them down, Belcher said, opening a realm of possibilities from cleaning up rivers to developing chemical warfare agents to combating smog.

Belcher’s lab worked with the U.S. Army to produce protective clothing and masks made of these carbon-based virus nanofibers. “We went from five liters in our lab to a thousand liters, then 10,000 liters in the army labs where we’re able to make kilograms of the material,” Belcher said, stressing the importance of being able to test and prototype at scale.

Imaging tools and therapeutics in cancer

In the area of biomedical imaging, Belcher explained, a lot less is known in near-infrared imaging — imaging in wavelengths above 1,000 nanometers — than other imaging techniques, yet with near-infrared scientists can see much deeper inside the body. Belcher’s lab built their own systems to image at these wavelengths. The third generation of this system provides real-time, sub-millimeter optical imaging for guided surgery.

Working with Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Engineering, Belcher used carbon nanotubes to build imaging tools that find tiny tumors during surgery that doctors otherwise would not be able to see. The tool is actually a virus engineered to carry with it a fluorescent, single-walled carbon nanotube as it seeks out the tumors.

Nearing the end of her talk, Belcher presented a goal: to develop an accessible detection and diagnostic technology for ovarian cancer in five to 10 years.

“We think that we can do it,” Belcher said. She described her students’ work developing a way to scan an entire fallopian tube, as opposed to just one small portion, to find pre-cancer lesions, and talked about the team of MIT faculty, doctors, and researchers working collectively toward this goal.

“Part of the secret of life and the meaning of life is helping other people enjoy the passage of time,” said Belcher in her closing remarks. “I think that we can all do that by working to solve some of the biggest issues on the planet, including helping to diagnose and treat ovarian cancer early so people have more time to spend with their family.”

Honoring Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Belcher was the fifth speaker to deliver the Dresselhaus Lecture, an annual event organized by MIT.nano to honor the late MIT physics and electrical engineering Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus. The lecture features a speaker from anywhere in the world whose leadership and impact echo Dresselhaus’s life, accomplishments, and values.

“Millie was and is a huge hero of mine,” said Belcher. “Giving a lecture in Millie’s name is just the greatest honor.”

Belcher dedicated the talk to Dresselhaus, whom she described with an array of accolades — a trailblazer, a genius, an amazing mentor, teacher, and inventor. “Just knowing her was such a privilege,” she said.

Belcher also dedicated her talk to her own grandmother and mother, both of whom passed away from cancer, as well as late MIT professors Susan Lindquist and Angelika Amon, who both died of ovarian cancer.

“I’ve been so fortunate to work with just the most talented and dedicated graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, and researchers,” concluded Belcher. “It has been a pure joy to be in partnership with all of you to solve these very daunting problems.”

© Photo: Justin Knight

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

MIT.nano has announced that Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

“With an international perspective on the world’s energy challenges, Shell is an exciting addition to the MIT.nano Consortium,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “The quest to build a sustainable energy future will require creative thinking backed by broad and deep expertise that our Shell colleagues bring. They will be insightful collaborators for the MIT community and for our member companies as we work together to explore innovative technology strategies.”

Founded in 1907 when Shell Transport and Trading Co. merged with Royal Dutch, Shell has more than a century’s worth of experience in the exploration, production, refining, and marketing of oil and natural gas and the manufacturing and marketing of chemicals. Operating in over 70 countries, Shell has set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. To achieve this, Shell is supporting developments of low-carbon energy solutions such as biofuels, hydrogen, charging for electric vehicles, and electricity generated by solar and wind power.

“In line with our Powering Progress strategy, our research efforts to become a net-zero emission energy company by 2050 will require intense collaboration with academic leaders across a wide range of disciplines,” says Rolf van Benthem, Shell’s chief scientist for materials science. “We look forward to engaging with the top-notch PIs [principal investigators] at MIT.nano who excel in fields like materials design and nanoscale characterization for use in energy applications and carbon utilization. Together we can work on truly sustainable solutions for our society.”

Shell has been engaged in research collaborations with MIT since 2002 and is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Recent MIT projects supported by Shell include an urban building energy model with the MIT Sustainable Design Laboratory that explores energy-saving building retrofits, a study of the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways with MITEI, and a materials science and engineering project to design better batteries for electric vehicles.

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, Shell will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices;
• Draper;
• Edwards;
• Fujikura;
• IBM Research;
• Lam Research;
• NC;
• NEC;
• Raith;
• UpNano; and
• Viavi Solutions.

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of MIT.nano.

“How do we get to making nanomaterials that haven’t been evolved before?” asked Angela Belcher at the 2023 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 20. “We can use elements that biology has already given us.”

The combined in-person and virtual audience of over 300 was treated to a light-up, 3D model of M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only infects bacteria, complete with a pull-out strand of DNA. Belcher used the feather-boa-like model to show how her research group modifies the M13’s genes to add new DNA and peptide sequences to template inorganic materials.

“I love controlling materials at the nanoscale using biology,” said Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, materials science professor, and of the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “We all know if you control materials at the nanoscale and you can start to tune them, then you can have all kinds of different applications.” And the opportunities are indeed vast — from building batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells to carbon sequestration and storage, environmental remediation, catalysis, and medical diagnostics and imaging.

Belcher sprinkled her talk with models and props, lined up on a table at the front of the 10-250 lecture hall, to demonstrate a wide variety of concepts and projects made possible by the intersection of biology and nanotechnology.

Energy storage and environment

“How do you go from a DNA sequence to a functioning battery?” posed Belcher. Grabbing a model of a large carbon nanotube, she explained how her group engineered a phage to pick up carbon nanotubes that would wind all the way around the virus and then fill in with different cathode or anode materials to make nanowires for battery electrodes.

How about using the M13 bacteriophage to improve the environment? Belcher referred to a project by former student Geran Zhang PhD ’19 that proved the virus can be modified for this context, too. He used the phage to template high-surface-area, carbon-based materials that can grab small molecules and break them down, Belcher said, opening a realm of possibilities from cleaning up rivers to developing chemical warfare agents to combating smog.

Belcher’s lab worked with the U.S. Army to produce protective clothing and masks made of these carbon-based virus nanofibers. “We went from five liters in our lab to a thousand liters, then 10,000 liters in the army labs where we’re able to make kilograms of the material,” Belcher said, stressing the importance of being able to test and prototype at scale.

Imaging tools and therapeutics in cancer

In the area of biomedical imaging, Belcher explained, a lot less is known in near-infrared imaging — imaging in wavelengths above 1,000 nanometers — than other imaging techniques, yet with near-infrared scientists can see much deeper inside the body. Belcher’s lab built their own systems to image at these wavelengths. The third generation of this system provides real-time, sub-millimeter optical imaging for guided surgery.

Working with Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Engineering, Belcher used carbon nanotubes to build imaging tools that find tiny tumors during surgery that doctors otherwise would not be able to see. The tool is actually a virus engineered to carry with it a fluorescent, single-walled carbon nanotube as it seeks out the tumors.

Nearing the end of her talk, Belcher presented a goal: to develop an accessible detection and diagnostic technology for ovarian cancer in five to 10 years.

“We think that we can do it,” Belcher said. She described her students’ work developing a way to scan an entire fallopian tube, as opposed to just one small portion, to find pre-cancer lesions, and talked about the team of MIT faculty, doctors, and researchers working collectively toward this goal.

“Part of the secret of life and the meaning of life is helping other people enjoy the passage of time,” said Belcher in her closing remarks. “I think that we can all do that by working to solve some of the biggest issues on the planet, including helping to diagnose and treat ovarian cancer early so people have more time to spend with their family.”

Honoring Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Belcher was the fifth speaker to deliver the Dresselhaus Lecture, an annual event organized by MIT.nano to honor the late MIT physics and electrical engineering Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus. The lecture features a speaker from anywhere in the world whose leadership and impact echo Dresselhaus’s life, accomplishments, and values.

“Millie was and is a huge hero of mine,” said Belcher. “Giving a lecture in Millie’s name is just the greatest honor.”

Belcher dedicated the talk to Dresselhaus, whom she described with an array of accolades — a trailblazer, a genius, an amazing mentor, teacher, and inventor. “Just knowing her was such a privilege,” she said.

Belcher also dedicated her talk to her own grandmother and mother, both of whom passed away from cancer, as well as late MIT professors Susan Lindquist and Angelika Amon, who both died of ovarian cancer.

“I’ve been so fortunate to work with just the most talented and dedicated graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, and researchers,” concluded Belcher. “It has been a pure joy to be in partnership with all of you to solve these very daunting problems.”

© Photo: Justin Knight

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

© Image: Anton Grassl

MIT.nano has announced that Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

“With an international perspective on the world’s energy challenges, Shell is an exciting addition to the MIT.nano Consortium,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “The quest to build a sustainable energy future will require creative thinking backed by broad and deep expertise that our Shell colleagues bring. They will be insightful collaborators for the MIT community and for our member companies as we work together to explore innovative technology strategies.”

Founded in 1907 when Shell Transport and Trading Co. merged with Royal Dutch, Shell has more than a century’s worth of experience in the exploration, production, refining, and marketing of oil and natural gas and the manufacturing and marketing of chemicals. Operating in over 70 countries, Shell has set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. To achieve this, Shell is supporting developments of low-carbon energy solutions such as biofuels, hydrogen, charging for electric vehicles, and electricity generated by solar and wind power.

“In line with our Powering Progress strategy, our research efforts to become a net-zero emission energy company by 2050 will require intense collaboration with academic leaders across a wide range of disciplines,” says Rolf van Benthem, Shell’s chief scientist for materials science. “We look forward to engaging with the top-notch PIs [principal investigators] at MIT.nano who excel in fields like materials design and nanoscale characterization for use in energy applications and carbon utilization. Together we can work on truly sustainable solutions for our society.”

Shell has been engaged in research collaborations with MIT since 2002 and is a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Recent MIT projects supported by Shell include an urban building energy model with the MIT Sustainable Design Laboratory that explores energy-saving building retrofits, a study of the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways with MITEI, and a materials science and engineering project to design better batteries for electric vehicles.

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, Shell will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices;
• Draper;
• Edwards;
• Fujikura;
• IBM Research;
• Lam Research;
• NC;
• NEC;
• Raith;
• UpNano; and
• Viavi Solutions.

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of MIT.nano.

“How do we get to making nanomaterials that haven’t been evolved before?” asked Angela Belcher at the 2023 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 20. “We can use elements that biology has already given us.”

The combined in-person and virtual audience of over 300 was treated to a light-up, 3D model of M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only infects bacteria, complete with a pull-out strand of DNA. Belcher used the feather-boa-like model to show how her research group modifies the M13’s genes to add new DNA and peptide sequences to template inorganic materials.

“I love controlling materials at the nanoscale using biology,” said Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, materials science professor, and of the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “We all know if you control materials at the nanoscale and you can start to tune them, then you can have all kinds of different applications.” And the opportunities are indeed vast — from building batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells to carbon sequestration and storage, environmental remediation, catalysis, and medical diagnostics and imaging.

Belcher sprinkled her talk with models and props, lined up on a table at the front of the 10-250 lecture hall, to demonstrate a wide variety of concepts and projects made possible by the intersection of biology and nanotechnology.

Energy storage and environment

“How do you go from a DNA sequence to a functioning battery?” posed Belcher. Grabbing a model of a large carbon nanotube, she explained how her group engineered a phage to pick up carbon nanotubes that would wind all the way around the virus and then fill in with different cathode or anode materials to make nanowires for battery electrodes.

How about using the M13 bacteriophage to improve the environment? Belcher referred to a project by former student Geran Zhang PhD ’19 that proved the virus can be modified for this context, too. He used the phage to template high-surface-area, carbon-based materials that can grab small molecules and break them down, Belcher said, opening a realm of possibilities from cleaning up rivers to developing chemical warfare agents to combating smog.

Belcher’s lab worked with the U.S. Army to produce protective clothing and masks made of these carbon-based virus nanofibers. “We went from five liters in our lab to a thousand liters, then 10,000 liters in the army labs where we’re able to make kilograms of the material,” Belcher said, stressing the importance of being able to test and prototype at scale.

Imaging tools and therapeutics in cancer

In the area of biomedical imaging, Belcher explained, a lot less is known in near-infrared imaging — imaging in wavelengths above 1,000 nanometers — than other imaging techniques, yet with near-infrared scientists can see much deeper inside the body. Belcher’s lab built their own systems to image at these wavelengths. The third generation of this system provides real-time, sub-millimeter optical imaging for guided surgery.

Working with Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Engineering, Belcher used carbon nanotubes to build imaging tools that find tiny tumors during surgery that doctors otherwise would not be able to see. The tool is actually a virus engineered to carry with it a fluorescent, single-walled carbon nanotube as it seeks out the tumors.

Nearing the end of her talk, Belcher presented a goal: to develop an accessible detection and diagnostic technology for ovarian cancer in five to 10 years.

“We think that we can do it,” Belcher said. She described her students’ work developing a way to scan an entire fallopian tube, as opposed to just one small portion, to find pre-cancer lesions, and talked about the team of MIT faculty, doctors, and researchers working collectively toward this goal.

“Part of the secret of life and the meaning of life is helping other people enjoy the passage of time,” said Belcher in her closing remarks. “I think that we can all do that by working to solve some of the biggest issues on the planet, including helping to diagnose and treat ovarian cancer early so people have more time to spend with their family.”

Honoring Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Belcher was the fifth speaker to deliver the Dresselhaus Lecture, an annual event organized by MIT.nano to honor the late MIT physics and electrical engineering Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus. The lecture features a speaker from anywhere in the world whose leadership and impact echo Dresselhaus’s life, accomplishments, and values.

“Millie was and is a huge hero of mine,” said Belcher. “Giving a lecture in Millie’s name is just the greatest honor.”

Belcher dedicated the talk to Dresselhaus, whom she described with an array of accolades — a trailblazer, a genius, an amazing mentor, teacher, and inventor. “Just knowing her was such a privilege,” she said.

Belcher also dedicated her talk to her own grandmother and mother, both of whom passed away from cancer, as well as late MIT professors Susan Lindquist and Angelika Amon, who both died of ovarian cancer.

“I’ve been so fortunate to work with just the most talented and dedicated graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, and researchers,” concluded Belcher. “It has been a pure joy to be in partnership with all of you to solve these very daunting problems.”

© Photo: Justin Knight

VIAVI Solutions, a global provider of communications test and measurement and optical technologies, has joined the MIT.nano Consortium.

With roots going back to 1923 as Wandell and Goltermann and to 1948 as Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., VIAVI is a global enterprise supporting innovation in communication networks, hyperscale and enterprise data centers, consumer electronics, automotive sensing, mission-critical avionics, aerospace, and anti-counterfeiting technologies.

“VIAVI is an exciting new member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The company’s innovations overlap with MIT’s research interests in a variety of applications — electronics, 3D sensing, optics, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and more,” says Vladimir Bulović, the founding faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies. “VIAVI’s awareness of industry needs will make them a valuable collaborator as we at MIT.nano work to develop new technologies in the lab that can successfully transition to the real world.”

With over 3,600 employees in 22 countries, VIAVI is poised to contribute global insights to the MIT.nano Consortium and MIT research community.

“VIAVI is delighted to be part of the extraordinary MIT.nano ecosystem,” says Oleg Khaykin, president and CEO of VIAVI. “MIT.nano occupies a unique position at the intersection of academia, industry, and government. We look forward to collaborating with the organization and its stakeholders focused on innovation in materials and processes that will enable the photonics applications of the future.”

The MIT.nano Consortium is a platform for academia-industry collaboration centered around research and innovation emerging from nanoscale science and engineering at MIT. Through activities that include quarterly industry consortium meetings, VIAVI will gain insight into the work of MIT.nano’s community of users and provide advice to help guide and advance nanoscale innovations at MIT alongside the 11 other consortium companies:

• Analog Devices
• Edwards
• Fujikura
• IBM Research
• Lam Research
• Lockheed Martin
• NC
• NEC
• Raith
• Shell
• UpNano

MIT.nano continues to welcome new companies as sustaining members. For more details, visit the MIT.nano Consortium page.

© Photo courtesy of VIAVI Solutions.

“I want to tell you that you don’t have to be just one thing,” said Katie Eckermann ’03, MEng ’04, director of business development at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at a networking event for students considering careers in hard technologies. “There is a huge wealth of different jobs and roles within the semiconductor industry.”

Eckermann was one of two keynote speakers at the Design the Solution conference, presented by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Women’s Leadership Initiative, and co-sponsored by MIT.nano. Following the speaking portion of the event, attendees were invited to meet with representatives from AMD, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, Arm, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Marvell, Micron Technology, Samsung, Synopsys, and TSMC. This annual February event was one in a series organized by the GSA Women’s Leadership Initiative and hosted at universities across the country to highlight the global impact of a career in semiconductors and recruit more women into the hard-tech ecosystem.

Eckermann was joined by John Wuu ’96, MEng ’97, senior fellow design engineer at AMD. Together, the two highlighted some of the key trends and most significant challenges of the semiconductor industry, as well as shared their career paths and advice.

Wuu highlighted the tremendous increase in computing performance in recent years, illustrated in 2022 by Hewlett Packard’s Frontier computer — calculating complex problems much faster than several other supercomputers combined. While supercomputer performance has doubled every 1.2 years over the last 30 years, power efficiency has doubled only every 2.2 years — thus underscoring a clear need to continue the pace of performance sustainably and responsibly.

“These performance improvements are not about trying to break records just for the sake of breaking records,” said Wuu. “The demand for computing is very high and insatiable, and the improvements in performance that we’re getting are being used to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and important problems — from space exploration to climate change, and more.”

Both Wuu and Eckermann encouraged students pursuing careers in semiconductors to focus on learning and stretching themselves, taking risks, and growing their network. They also emphasized the many different skill sets needed in the semiconductor industry and the common problems that often exist across different market segments.

“One of the most valuable things about MIT is that it doesn’t teach you how to recite formulas or to memorize facts, it teaches you a framework on how to think,” said Eckermann. “And when it comes down to engineering, it’s all about solving complex problems.”

Following the keynote, Deb Dyson, senior staff engineering manager at Marvell, moderated a panel discussion featuring Rose Castanares, senior vice president for business management at TSMC North America; Kate Shamberger, field technical director for the Americas at Analog Devices; and Thy Tran, vice president of global frontend procurement at Micron Technology.

The panelists described their own individual and diverse career journeys, also emphasizing the tremendous amount and variety of opportunities currently available in semiconductors.

“Everywhere you look [in the semiconductor industry], it is the epicenter of all the intersectionality of the disciplines,” said Tran. “It’s the pure sciences, the math, the engineering, application-based, theory-based — I can’t believe I got so lucky to be in this arena.”

Some key themes of the panel discussion included the importance of teamwork and understanding the people you’re working with, the development of leadership styles, and trying out different types of roles within the industry. All speakers encouraged students to identify what they like to do most and think broadly and flexibly about how they can apply their skills and interests — and, above all, to always be learning and gaining a breadth of knowledge.

“It’s important to be continually learning — not just in your field, but also adjunct to your field,” said Castanares. “It’s not about trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, but the most curious person in the room — and then apply and share that knowledge.”

© Photo courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Association

Benjamin Warf, a renowned neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, stands in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. More than 3,000 miles away, his virtual avatar stands next to Matheus Vasconcelos in Brazil as the resident practices delicate surgery on a doll-like model of a baby’s brain.

With a pair of virtual-reality goggles, Vasconcelos is able to watch Warf’s avatar demonstrate a brain surgery procedure before replicating the technique himself and while asking questions of Warf’s digital twin.

“It’s an almost out-of-body experience,” Warf says of watching his avatar interact with the residents. “Maybe it’s how it feels to have an identical twin?”

And that’s the goal: Warf’s digital twin bridged the distance, allowing him to be functionally in two places at once. “It was my first training using this model, and it had excellent performance,” says Vasconcelos, a neurosurgery resident at Santa Casa de São Paulo School of Medical Sciences in São Paulo, Brazil. “As a resident, I now feel more confident and comfortable applying the technique in a real patient under the guidance of a professor.”

Warf’s avatar arrived via a new project launched by medical simulator and augmented reality (AR) company EDUCSIM. The company is part of the 2023 cohort of START.nano, MIT.nano’s deep-tech accelerator that offers early-stage startups discounted access to MIT.nano’s laboratories.

In March 2023, Giselle Coelho, EDUCSIM’s scientific director and a pediatric neurosurgeon at Santa Casa de São Paulo and Sabará Children’s Hospital, began working with technical staff in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create Warf’s avatar. By November, the avatar was training future surgeons like Vasconcelos.

“I had this idea to create the avatar of Dr. Warf as a proof of concept, and asked, ‘What would be the place in the world where they are working on technologies like that?’” Coelho says. “Then I found MIT.nano.”

Capturing a Surgeon

As a neurosurgery resident, Coelho was so frustrated by the lack of practical training options for complex surgeries that she built her own model of a baby brain. The physical model contains all the structures of the brain and can even bleed, “simulating all the steps of a surgery, from incision to skin closure,” she says.

She soon found that simulators and virtual reality (VR) demonstrations reduced the learning curve for her own residents. Coelho launched EDUCSIM in 2017 to expand the variety and reach of the training for residents and experts looking to learn new techniques.

Those techniques include a procedure to treat infant hydrocephalus that was pioneered by Warf, the director of neonatal and congenital neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. Coelho had learned the technique directly from Warf and thought his avatar might be the way for surgeons who couldn’t travel to Boston to benefit from his expertise.

To create the avatar, Coelho worked with Talis Reks, the AR/VR/gaming/big data IT technologist in the Immersion Lab.

“A lot of technology and hardware can be very expensive for startups to access as they start their company journey,” Reks explains. “START.nano is one way of enabling them to utilize and afford the tools and technologies we have at MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab.”

Coelho and her colleagues needed high-fidelity and high-resolution motion-capture technology, volumetric video capture, and a range of other VR/AR technologies to capture Warf’s dexterous finger motions and facial expressions. Warf visited MIT.nano on several occasions to be digitally “captured,” including performing an operation on the physical baby model while wearing special gloves and clothing embedded with sensors.

“These technologies have mostly been used for entertainment or VFX [visual effects] or CGI [computer-generated imagery],” says Reks, “But this is a unique project, because we’re applying it now for real medical practice and real learning.”

One of the biggest challenges, Reks says, was helping to develop what Coelho calls “holoportation”— transmitting the 3D, volumetric video capture of Warf in real-time over the internet so that his avatar can appear in transcontinental medical training.

The Warf avatar has synchronous and asynchronous modes. The training that Vasconcelos received was in the asynchronous mode, where residents can observe the avatar’s demonstrations and ask it questions. The answers, delivered in a variety of languages, come from AI algorithms that draw from previous research and an extensive bank of questions and answers provided by Warf.

In the synchronous mode, Warf operates his avatar from a distance in real time, Coelho says. “He could walk around the room, he could talk to me, he could orient me. It’s amazing.”

Coelho, Warf, Reks, and other team members demonstrated a combination of the modes in a second session in late December. This demo consisted of volumetric live video capture between the Immersion Lab and Brazil, spatialized and visible in real-time through AR headsets. It significantly expanded upon the previous demo, which had only streamed volumetric data in one direction through a two-dimensional display.

Powerful impacts

Warf has a long history of training desperately needed pediatric neurosurgeons around the world, most recently through his nonprofit Neurokids. Remote and simulated training has been an increasingly large part of training since the pandemic, he says, although he doesn’t feel it will ever completely replace personal hands-on instruction and collaboration.

“But if in fact one day we could have avatars, like this one from Giselle, in remote places showing people how to do things and answering questions for them, without the cost of travel, without the time cost and so forth, I think it could be really powerful,” Warf says.

The avatar project is especially important for surgeons serving remote and underserved areas like the Amazon region of Brazil, Coelho says. “This is a way to give them the same level of education that they would get in other places, and the same opportunity to be in touch with Dr. Warf.”

One baby treated for hydrocephalus at a recent Amazon clinic had traveled by boat 30 hours for the surgery, according to Coelho.

Training surgeons with the avatar, she says, “can change reality for this baby and can change the future.”

© Photo courtesy of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab.