Air Force Office of Scientific Research Center of Excellence (COE) Radiation Effect in Electronic Materials, Circuits, Devices, and Systems
FOA-AFRL-AFOSR-2021-0001
Grants.gov  https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=330128
White papers deadline January 7, 2021

The Center of Excellence should extend the research interests of AFRL on the topical area of in Radiation Effects in Electronic Materials, Circuits, and Systems and provide opportunities for a new generation of US scientists and engineers to address United States Space Force (USSF) and United States Air Force (USAF) research needs.  This is a special FOA because it explicitly calls for (a) research in the high-priority Air Force interest area of effects of radiation damage to electronics and how the mitigate them; and (b) education of students within the US in vital technology areas with opportunities for potential recruitment of US nationals for employment at AFRL.

The USAF’s Space Enterprise vision, where autonomy and decision-making are pushed ever closer to space-based assets, and where unprecedented computational performance is expected on-station, is bringing to the fore new sets of technologies. Examples of emerging materials and the capabilities include:

• ·       Wide- and ultrawide-bandgap (WG/UWG) semiconductors, with the possibility of Ga2O3, nitrides, and diamond further in the future, for use in power electronics and RF amplifiers for space communications.
• ·       New narrow-gap materials, such as InGaP and InGaPSb, for next-generation mid-wavelength IR sensors.
• ·       New semiconductor alloys, IV-IV, III-V, or II-VI, for use in next-generation solar cells.
• ·       Two-dimensional (2-D), graphene-like materials, such as MoS2, and their heterostructures.
• ·       Devices based on new materials, and displaying new physics, such as memristors, synstors, and coupled oscillators, that enable very-low-power neuromorphic processing.
• ·       New device architectures, such as gate-all-around field effect transistors and massively 3-D integrated circuits with unforeseen radiation interactions.
• ·       New classes of bio-inspired algorithms and architectures, such as spiking deep neural networks, designed to function in noisy environments.
• ·       New directed energy devices that use electron beams to generate high-power microwave sources, and the concomitant e-beam damage.