Nanoscale resistive switching (RS) elements, also known as memristors, are nowadays regarded as a promising solution for establishing next-generation memory, due to their infinitesimal dimensions, their capacity to store multiple bits of information per element and the miniscule energy required to write distinct states. Currently, the microelectronics community aspires exploiting these attributes in a deterministic fashion where information encoding and processing is realised via static representations. In consequence, research efforts are focused on optimising memristor technology in a "More Moore" approach to comply with existing CMOS devices attributes, i.e. high-yield, supreme reproducibility, very long retention characteristics and conventional circuit design formalisms. The functional properties of such elements are however associated with irreversible rate-limiting electro/thermo-dynamic changes that often bring them in "far from equilibrium" conditions, manifesting opportunities for unconventional computing within a probabilistic framework. This fellowship aims exploiting the strong emergence of ultra-thin functional oxides, nanoscale resistive switching elements and large-scale systems of the same. We will first investigate the effect of quantum phase transitions and the mechanisms leading into thermodynamically stable/unstable long-range order/disorder of distinct materials. These mechanisms will then be exploited in nanoscale solid-state devices for establishing the state-of-the-art in non-volatile multi-state memory but also volatile elements that could potentially be employed as dynamic computational elements. The rich-dynamics of the later will be compared against reaction-diffusion mechanisms of naturally occurring nano-systems to facilitate novel design paradigms and emerging ICT applications for substantiating unconventional computation formalisms. A successful outcome will demonstrate a mature memristive device manufacturing technology that will be supported by the necessary design tools, for taking CMOS technology far beyond its current state-of-art.

Graphene is a single layer of graphite just one atom thick. As a material it is completely new - not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. It is almost completely transparent, yet as a conductor of electricity it performs as well or even better than copper. Since the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to UK researchers in this field, fundamental graphene research has attracted much investment by industry and governments around the world, and has created unprecedented excitement. There have been numerous proof-of concept demonstrations for a wide range of applications for graphene. Many applications require high quality material, however, most high quality graphene to date is made by exfoliation with scotch tape from graphite flakes. This is not a manufacturable route as graphene produced this way is prohibitively expensive, equivalent to £10bn per 12" wafer. For high quality graphene to become commercially viable, its price needs to be reduced to £30-100 per wafer, a factor of 100 million. Hence graphene production and process technology is the key bottleneck to be overcome in order to unlock its huge application potential. Overcoming this bottleneck lies at the heart of this proposal. Our proposal aims to develop the potential of graphene into a robust and disruptive technology. We will use a growth method called chemical vapour deposition (CVD) as the key enabler, and address the key questions of industrial materials development. CVD was the growth method that opened up diamond, carbon nanotubes and GaN to industrial scale production. Here it will be developed for graphene as CVD has the potential to give graphene over large areas at low cost and at a quality that equals that of the best exfoliated flakes. CVD is also a quite versatile process that enables novel strategies to integrate graphene with other materials into device architectures. In collaboration with leading industrial partners Aixtron UK, Philips, Intel, Thales and Selex Galileo, we will develop novel integration routes for a diverse set of near-term as well as future applications, for which graphene can outperform current materials and allows the use of previously impossible device form factors and functionality. We will integrate graphene for instance as a transparent conductor into organic light emitting diodes that offer new, efficient and environmentally friendly solutions for general lighting, including a flexible form factor that could revolutionize traditional lighting designs. We will also integrate graphene into liquid crystal devices that offer ultra high resolution and novel optical storage systems. Unlike currently used materials, graphene is also transparent in the infrared range, which is of great interest for many sensing applications in avionics, military imaging and fire safety which we will explore. Furthermore, we propose to develop a carbon based interconnect technology to overcome the limitations Cu poses for next generation microelectronics. This is a key milestone in the semiconductor industry roadmap. As a potential disruptive future technology, we propose to integrate graphene into so called lab-on-a-chip devices tailored to rapid single-molecule biosensing. These are predicted to revolutionize clinical analysis in particular regarding DNA and protein structure determination.

The ever-increasing combined carbon footprint of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable - more efficient devices must be developed. Thermal characterisation, which feeds into design optimisation, is one of the key steps for ensuring the efficiency and reliable operation of the new electronic devices being developed. However, accurately measuring the temperature of leading-edge electronic devices is becoming increasingly difficult or impossible because of their small size, and that is the challenge addressed in this proposal. Wide bandgap electronic devices including GaN have great proven potential for the next generation of sustainable ICT and power electronics, contributing to the needed carbon emissions reduction. Miniaturization is one of the routes to further increase the efficiency and performance of wide bandgap electronic devices, decreasing the active region size to <200 nm, similar to the technology pathway that silicon (Si) electronics has taken, using concepts such as the FinFET. Thermal management, which is the efficient extraction of waste heat from the active part of the device, is especially important for achieving efficient reliable nanoscale electronic devices; thermal resistance increases as they are "scaled" to nanometre dimensions because of a thermal conductivity reduction and heat confinement in 3-D device structures, e.g. in a fin shape. While self-heating can be mitigated reasonably easily for lower power density Si FinFETs, it is potentially a significant roadblock for "scaled" wide bandgap devices which operate at enormous power densities. However there is currently no thermal imaging technique with a sufficiently high spatial resolution (e.g. Raman thermography has a diffraction limited resolution of about 0.5 micrometer, >10x the hotspot size) to be able to accurately measure the hotspot temperature of these novel nanoscale wide bandgap electronic devices. Instead we currently rely on complex electrothermal models to estimate the temperature of nanoscale devices, with inherent uncertainties - measurement is needed. A step change is required, namely a sub diffraction limit (super resolution) thermal imaging technique, which is addressed by the Future thermal Imaging with Nanometre Enhanced Resolution (FINER) project. We will develop a transformative nano quantum dot based thermal imaging (nQTI) technique to deliver nanometre resolution thermal imaging for the first time. To demonstrate the newly developed technique our application focus is on scaled wide bandgap electronic devices supplied by our national and international partners, however this technique will be widely applicable. Quantum dots are ideal for this application: They can be deposited as a nm-thickness film on the surface of the device being tested, and the emission colour is temperature dependent, which is what we exploit for thermal imaging. Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) and Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) super-resolution techniques which were originally developed for fluorescence microscopy, but are presently unsuitable for thermal imaging, will be exploited to achieve a resolution as small as 50nm for nQTI. nQTI will enable nano-scale electrothermal models to be developed and experimentally verified. Accurate models will further our understanding of nano-scale self-heating and heat diffusion, feeding back into improved device designs and novel thermal management solutions. This work will be done at the Centre for Device Thermography and Reliability (CDTR) which has an international reputation for being at the forefront of high spatial and temporal resolution thermal imaging, pioneering Raman thermography. This expertise makes the CDTR ideally placed to deliver this project successfully. The generous industrial support for this programme demonstrates that there is a great need for this and their belief in our ability to successfully deliver it.

Technologies underpin economic and industrial advances and improvements in healthcare, education and societal and public infrastructure. Technologies of the future depend on scientific breakthroughs of the past and present, including new knowledge bases, ideas, and concepts. The proposed international network of interdisciplinary centre-to-centre collaborations aims to drive scientific and technological progress by advancing and developing a new science platform for emerging technology - the optical frequency comb (OFC) with a range of practical applications of high industrial and societal importance in telecommunications, metrology, healthcare, environmental applications, bio-medicine, food industry and agri-tech and many other applications. The optical frequency comb is a breakthrough photonic technology that has already revolutionised a range of scientific and industrial fields. In the family of OFC technologies, dual-comb spectroscopy plays a unique role as the most advanced platform combining the strengths of conventional spectroscopy and laser spectroscopy. Measurement techniques relying on multi-comb, mostly dual-comb and very recently tri-combs, offer the promise of exquisite accuracy and speed. The large majority of initial laboratory results originate from cavity-based approaches either using bulky powerful Ti:Sapphire lasers, or ultra-compact micro-resonators. While these technologies have many advantages, they also feature certain drawbacks for some applications. They require complex electronic active stabilisation schemes to phase-lock the different single-combs together, and the characteristics of the multi-comb source are not tuneable since they are severely dictated by the opto-geometrical parameters of the cavity. Thus, their repetition rates cannot be optimised to the decay rates of targeted samples, nor their relative repetition rates to sample the response of the medium. Such lack of versatility leads to speed and resolution limitations. These major constraints impact the development of these promising systems and make difficult their deployment outside the labs. To drive OFC sources, and in particular, multi-comb source towards a tangible science-to-technology breakthrough, the current state of the art shows that a fundamental paradigm shift is required to achieve the needs of robustness, performance and versatility in repetition rates and/or comb optical characteristics as dictated by the diversity of applications. In this project we propose and explore new approaches to create flexible and tunable comb sources, based on original design concepts. The novelty and transformative nature of our programme is in addressing engineering challenges and designs treating nonlinearity as an inherent part of the engineering systems rather than as a foe. Using the unique opportunity provided by the EPSRC international research collaboration programme, this project will bring together a critical mass of academic and industrial partners with complimentary expertise ranging from nonlinear mathematics to industrial engineering to develop new concepts and ideas underpinning emerging and future OFC technologies. The project will enhance UK capabilities in key strategic areas including optical communications, laser technology, metrology, and sensing, including the mid-IR spectral region, highly important for healthcare and environment applications, food, agri-tech and bio-medical applications. Such a wide-ranging and transformative project requires collaborative efforts of academic and industrial groups with complimentary expertise across these fields. There are currently no other UK projects addressing similar research challenges. Therefore, we believe that this project will make an important contribution to UK standing in this field of high scientific and industrial importance.

NanoScience is the emerging research discipline of building designer materials or machines which do entirely new things, by combining thousands of atoms arranged in intricate assemblies and connections. Understanding and controlling this new science results in NanoTechnology estimated to be one of the massive opportunities in the 21st Century, for making devices that really do what we want cheaper, faster, cooler, smarter and more efficiently. The process of assembly is the key to fostering widespread implementation of nanoscience discoveries. This is an area in which the UK must be strong to reap the rewards of increased investment. Most emerging opportunities depend on radically improving such nano-organisation, needed to impact major societal themes of Energy, Healthcare and Nano. However despite all these claims, which are mostly well-founded conceptually, the difficult is in how to really build on this extreme scale. Bigger than molecules but smaller than machinery, we have only learnt in recent years how to grow a plethora of nano-components. But perfecting ways to bring together these nano-components into active devices is the new challenge. Traditional approaches that piece things together laboriously are completely unfeasible here. The aim of our Doctoral Training Centre in Assembly of Functional NanoMaterials and NanoDevices is to hothouse training of a high-calibre cadre of inter-disciplinary nano-researchers and spur them to develop entirely new ways to assemble nano-machinery for doing something useful. The academics involved in this Nano DTC have all had experience of helping to teach young researchers across a range of research fields such as Physics, Materials Science, Chemistry and Engineering, and have also shown a real interest in developing novel ideas into practical inventions and engaged with companies (many of them their own spin-offs). The University of Cambridge has a large number of scientific programmes in this area, so a large opportunity exists to join them up, with the PhD students all interacting very widely across these disciplines, as well as engaging with the nitty-gritty tools of how nano-innovation can make it out into the real world.The Nano DTC will operate as a distinct PhD nursery, with the entry co-housed and jointly mentored in the initial year of formal courses and project work. Students from a range of undergraduate disciplines will thus spend considerable time together while each postgraduate will have a selection of 1st year courses crafted on entry by the DTC management committee, depending on their specific skill set and aspirations. The initial year provides additional skills in disciplines outside their degree, understanding of the Enterprise landscape relating to Nano-Innovation, specific knowledge of the nanoscience and application of self-assembly to NanoDevices and NanoMaterials, and miniprojects spanning different disciplines to broaden students' experience and peer networks, aiding final PhD project selection. A range of joint activities are programmed in later years including Nano DTC cohort student-led conferences, and industry reviews.Although individual examples of nano-entrepreneurship can be found across the UK, graduate students are rarely exposed to this experience, and frequently it is seen as detrimental to their research progress. A repeated theme emerging from nano research-to-application projects is how early-stage nano-construction strategies benefit from being informed by eventual scale-up, implementation routes, market potential and societal awareness. In turn, this joined up approach feeds back into the basic science process, frequently stretching research programs beyond the well-trodden paths and stimulating high impact science as well as innovation. The aim of the Cambridge Nano DTC is to make this experience pervasive for a new brand of UK Nano PhD students.