After delivering on ambitious first-year milestones for projects in quantum and semiconductor technologies, researchers in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering have helped secure millions of dollars in additional federal funding for the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub, also known as NORDTECH, to continue its work in strengthening U.S. technological and defense needs.
NORDTECH is a regional consortium of government labs, defense companies, academic institutions and technology manufacturing organizations in New York state and one of eight hubs composing the U.S. Microelectronics Commons program.
The consortium announced four U.S. Department of War awards totaling more than $25 million on April 28, three of which involve critical participation from Duffield Engineering faculty.
Next-generation nitride electronics
Debdeep Jena, the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading “Nitride RF Next-Generation Technology (NITRIDER),” a project advancing wide bandgap semiconductor devices for high-frequency and high-power electronics. The project received $7.05 million in second-year funding.
In its first year, the Cornell-led team – which includes collaborators from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; Northrup Grumman; Soctera, Inc.; Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, LLC; Crystal IS, Inc.; and Qorvo Texas, LLC – demonstrated a series of first-of-their-kind transistor devices built from aluminum-nitride and gallium-nitride materials.
Among the milestones were high electron mobility transistors fabricated on 150-millimeter wafers for operation in high radio-frequency bands, record-conductivity superlattice transistor structures with ultrathin lattice-matched layers, and aluminum nitride-based transistor architectures achieving record continuous-wave power performance at microwave frequencies.
The team, which included Grace Xing, William L. Quackenbush Professor of Engineering, also advanced bulk aluminum nitride substrates for millimeter-wave operation and implemented vertical through-wafer interconnect integration, enabling more compact and scalable chip architectures. The new funding will continue to advance high-power, high-frequency nitride electronics closer to manufacturable devices for national defense applications like 6G communications and radar systems.
Quantum photonics systems
Karan Mehta, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is co-leading a project with AIM Photonics, “Quantum Ultra-broadband Photonic Integrated Circuits and Systems (QUPICS),” which received $8.92 million in second-year funding. The project focuses on building advanced photonic integrated circuits that operate from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths for quantum atomic and optical systems.
In the first year of the project – which includes collaborators from Rochester Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Yale University, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Quantinuum, Xanadu, and Toptica USA – researchers integrated new material layers of aluminum oxide and ultra-thin silicon nitride into silicon photonics platforms and established core fabrication processes needed to support ion-trap-based quantum devices. These materials and methods enabled the design and validation of a broad set of components such as waveguides to route light, optical splitters, beam-shaping elements, miniature laser structures and resonators that confine and control light on a chip.
In the next phase, the project is focused on scaling these technologies to industry-standard 300-millimeter wafers, a move aimed at making advanced quantum photonic devices more manufacturable. The team is working to reduce optical losses in the circuits while preparing chips for demonstrations with ion-based devices. Researchers are also developing capabilities for quantum frequency conversion and compact photon-pair sources, which are important for linking different types of quantum hardware and enabling high-speed quantum communication and sensing.
Scalable quantum manufacturing
Valla Fatemi, an assistant professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, serves as a technical co-lead of a $5.4 million project led by the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science (NY Creates) that aims to demonstrate scalable quantum error correction and innovative quantum circuits. The project, “Improved Materials for Superconducting Qubits With Scalable Fabrication,” includes collaborators from Princeton University, Syracuse University, New York University, D-Wave Quantum (QCI), SEEQC, and AFRL’s Information Directorate.
Over the past year, Fatemi’s lab spearheaded a new approach that makes it possible to scale the deposition of critical superconducting thin films to the 300-millimeter scale at industry-standard semiconductor fabrication facilities. Building on that advance, the team demonstrated leading-edge qubit performance by leveraging nanofabrication capabilities at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, materials analysis at the Cornell Center for Materials Research and in-house device testing.
Together, the larger team has established core manufacturing infrastructure for superconducting quantum bits, delivered essential packaging and testing methods, and produced the first elements of a superconducting quantum process design kit, a shared framework that supports more efficient and reproducible quantum circuit design.
In the next phase, the project will focus on fabricating full qubit chips, transferring advanced nanofabrication processes from research settings into prototyping and manufacturing environments, and expanding the design kit to support broader adoption and scalability across the quantum research community.
“This renewed funding reflects the strength of Cornell’s leadership in quantum science and semiconductor research, and the collaborative role that expertise plays within NORDTECH,” said Gary Koretzky, vice provost for research at Cornell. “The hub is designed to move critical technologies from discovery to manufacturing, and Cornell engineers are helping drive that mission by delivering results that matter at a national scale.”