ECS

Photo: Professor Hiroshi Mizuta Professor Hiroshi Mizuta’s mission is to develop new types of silicon-based devices which create advanced functionalities at nanoscale so that our future ICT (Information and Communication Technology) such as mobile phones and computers will be even lighter , more functional and more economical.

He already made a major contribution to this field when he developed a new memory device called PLEDM TM (Phase-state Low Electron-number Drive Memory), which is a single chip which enables instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information while consuming very little power.

Hiroshi studied solid-state physics at Osaka University, Japan and then in the mid-80s, he got interested in making his own solid-state electronic devices based on quantum-mechanical phenomena and decided to join the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory in Tokyo in 1985.

Hiroshi's early years at Hitachi were spent developing functional devices based on electron-wave resonance occurring in semiconductor superlattices.

'Basically, I was studying the quantum-mechanical phenomenon that gives more functionality to conventional transistors,' he said.

In 1989, Hiroshi was asked to move to Cambridge to set up a new Hitachi laboratory there.

'This was exciting as I was given a blank sheet and asked to think about developing something new to influence the future of electronics,' he said.

He began to collaborate with academics at the University of Cambridge with a view to developing ultra small devices which operate by controlling the motion of individual electrons; such a device is called the single-electron transistor. He also participated in the EU ESPRIT programme as the first Anglo-Japanese industrial member to develop high-speed single-electron memory.

Based on the studies on the single-electron devices, the concept of PLEDM came about.

'I believed that it was a breakthrough to replace all types of conventional memories at multi-Gigabit generation.' said Hiroshi.

Hiroshi really believed that PLEDM would be developed for the market, but due to a complex business situation, this did not happen.

It was time for Hiroshi to move on to academia so that he could develop his research further. In 2003, he joined the Department of Physical Electronics at Tokyo Institute of Technology as Associate Professor.

In April 2007, he decided to return to the UK to join the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

'I joined because firstly I was impressed by the high quality of research at ECS and also by an atmosphere of encouraging collaboration with other departments,' he said.

Now in January 2010, just over two years since he joined ECS, Hiroshi has been made Head of the Nano Research Group and will co-lead the Group with Professor Peter Ashburn, who has become Director of the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre .

Hiroshi is very keen to develop novel nanoelectronic devices and he believes that he will have an excellent opportunity to do this within his new role.

'I want to develop my own research on 'More than Moore' and 'Beyond CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor)' nanoelectronic devices,' he said.

Hiroshi plans to develop ‘extreme silicon nanotechnologies’ by combining a top-down approach to nanoelectronics with a n atom-scale bottom-up approach which will give a breakthrough to solve fatal issue s for the present silicon nanodevices such as exponentially increasing power dissipation and inevitable variability due to random dopants.

With 'More than Moore', he is trying to co-integrate nanoelectromechanical s ystems (NEMS) with conventional electronic devices to create high-performance and more functional switch, memory and sensor devices.

For going 'Beyond CMOS', he is working on quantum information devices based on silicon and grapheme-based single-electron spin technology, which could realize massively-parallel information processing.

In fact, he has just won £1 million of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to build the world’s first silicon-based integrated single-spin quantum bit (qubit) system , jointly with his partners from University of Cambridge, the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory and NTT Basics Research Laboratories.

This new system will enable researchers working with silicon to initialise, manipulate and read single- electron ’s ‘spin’ states rather than just charge states . In the past, it has been possible to capture just electronic charge. The advantage of employing spin rather than charge is that spin can maintain coherence and is hardly destroyed by interference in silicon or graphene .

The approach will also enable the development of novel nano spintronic devices - nanoscale circuits that could use the spin of the individual electrons to transmit, store and process information. In principle, such devices could dramatically enhance scaling of functional density and performance while simultaneously reducing the energy dissipated per functional operation.

Hiroshi believes that the ECS' new £55 million clean room, the high level of expertise available to him and the possibility of collaboration with other strong groups such as the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), Schools of Engineering Science, Physics and Chemistry, will allow him to develop more hybrid devices and systems.

'I believe that if we adopt unique properties of atomically-controlled nano structures and heterogeneous co-integration with other emerging technologies such as NEMS, nanophotonics and nanospintronics, we can develop extremely functional information processing devices, faster than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional technologies,' he said.