Alumnus and Fellow of Churchill College, Prof. Manish Chhowalla, has been awarded one of the most prestigious research grants in Europe. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Prof. Chhowalla an Advanced Grant worth approximately €3.4 million over five years to fund his work on next-generation computer chip technology.
Prof. Chhowalla is one of four Cambridge researchers to receive an Advanced Grant in this funding round. The ERC awarded €838 million in total to 319 leading researchers across Europe this year. The competition is famously tough. This year it attracted a record 3,329 proposals, up 31% on last year, and only around 9.6% were successful. The UK received more awards than any other country in this round.
Prof. Chhowalla’s project, called TOPCONNECT, tackles a problem hiding inside almost every piece of modern electronics: the tiny wires, known as interconnects, that link the billions of transistors on a computer chip. Although a chip might measure just one centimetre by one centimetre, the combined length of its internal wiring can stretch for more than 30 miles.
All that wiring comes at a cost. As electricity travels through these interconnects, energy is lost as heat. Prof. Chhowalla estimates that around 30% of the energy used in electronics is wasted this way. With the world’s appetite for computing power only growing, this is becoming an increasingly urgent problem.
“Modern electronics already consume around 5% of the world’s energy, and that figure is expected to rise above 20% by 2030,” Prof. Chhowalla said. “Interconnects account for a significant share of that. TOPCONNECT aims to develop new materials that can carry electrical signals far more efficiently, helping to make the chips of the future faster and much less wasteful.”
The project will explore topological semi-metals, a class of materials that behave very differently from the metals currently used in chip manufacturing, as a possible replacement for traditional interconnect wiring. If successful, the work could lead to electronic devices that use significantly less power, with benefits ranging from longer battery life in everyday gadgets to major energy savings in the data centres that underpin the modern internet.
Prof. Chhowalla’s path to Cambridge has taken him around the world. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Churchill College, before taking up a Royal Academy of Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship. He then spent time working in industry, developing applications for “amorphous diamond” coatings, before becoming a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He returned to Cambridge in 2018, where he is now Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science and a Fellow of Churchill College.
His research today focuses on atomically thin two-dimensional materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs. His group has shown that it is possible to switch these materials between different physical phases, each with very different properties, opening up new possibilities for transistors, catalysis and energy storage.
Churchill Fellow Prof. Sir John Aston, Cambridge’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, congratulated all four Cambridge recipients of this year’s Advanced Grants. “We are so fortunate at Cambridge to have so many world-leading researchers right across the University, and this type of long-term funding is invaluable, allowing senior researchers the time and space to develop potential solutions for some of the biggest challenges the world faces,” he said. “I very much look forward to seeing the outcomes of their work.”
Advanced Grants are designed to give established researchers the freedom to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects over several years, without the pressure of more typical short-term funding cycles. The TOPCONNECT project will run for five years, with Prof. Chhowalla and his team based at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.