Researchers have made significant advances toward the goal of a new microchip able to grow DNA strands that could provide high-density 3D archival data storage at ultra-low cost – and be able to hold that information for hundreds of years. To enable the technology, researchers have also developed a correction system able to compensate for errors in reading data stored in the DNA.
DNA data storage uses the four bases that make up biological DNA - adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C) – to store data in a way that is analogous to the zeroes and ones of traditional computing. Current DNA storage is mostly restricted to boutique applications such as time capsules, but there is broad interest in DNA as the next major storage medium for massive data archives.
The proof-of-concept nanofabricated microchips include tiny microwell structures a few hundred nanometers deep from which the DNA strands grow in a massively parallel process. The chips will ultimately include a second layer of electronic controls – fabricated in conventional CMOS – that will manage the chemical process as a unique molecule of DNA is grown in each of the wells, one base at a time. Once the sequence of bases that stores data has been completed, the DNA strands will be stripped off the surface and dried for long-term storage.
Because each base that stores information consists of a small number of atoms, the technique will allow hundreds of terabytes of information – that would now require many conventional disk drives – to be stored in a single dot of DNA. GTRI is working with California biotech companies Twist Bioscience and Roswell Biotechnologies toward a goal of demonstrating this new type of commercially viable data storage that could eventually scale into the exabyte regime.
“We’ve been able to show that it’s possible to grow DNA to the sort of length that we want, and at about the feature size that we care about using these chips,” said Nicholas Guise, a GTRI senior research scientist who is project director for SMASH. “The goal is to grow millions of unique, independent sequences across the chip from these microwells, with each serving as a tiny electrochemical bioreactor.”
The current prototype chip is about an inch square and includes 10 banks of microwells where the DNA is grown. “Working with our colleagues at Twist and in Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, we have optimized the geometry of the microwells to fit more and more of them on a chip,” he explained.
Georgia Institute of Technology Research in Microelectronics Dominates the 2021 International Electron Device Meeting
With holiday shopping deadlines looming, consumers cannot escape the impact of the global microelectronic chip shortage. From daily news reports about manufacturers unable to complete orders due to the lack of chips, to “out of stock” messages across websites on popular electronics items, one of the impacts of COVID was to lay bare the massive importance of the microelectronic chip in daily modern life, and how a single-location centered manufacturing nexus can upend the consumer market on a massive scale. The combination of these real-world impacts on supply chains, as well as the need to localize semiconductor and chip manufacturing gave Congress the impetus to pass the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act (CHIPS)”. CHIPS seeks to increase investments and incentives to support U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, research and development, and supply chain security.
The Georgia Institute of Technology was the first university to offer a comprehensive curriculum on microelectronics and microsystems design and packaging and, currently, numerous faculty at Georgia Tech are widely known for their work in semiconductor and microelectronics technologies. In December of 2021 Georgia Tech researchers will again showcase how their pushes the boundaries of microelectronics technologies at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering research teams of Assistant Professor Asif Khan, partnering with Dan Fielder Professor Muhannad Bakir, and Associate Professor Shimeng Yu, partnering with Professor Sung-Kyu Lim and Assistant Professor Shaolan Li, have dominated the 2021 IEDM presentation line-up with a total of 8 accepted papers. With topics ranging from ferroelectric materials for memory, new advances in ALD process, and in-memory computing and 3D reconfigurable architectures, the research presented by these teams is at the cutting-edge of advancing computing power and consumer electronics. In addition to the research presentations, Electrical and Computing Engineering Faculty & Director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center at GT will be presenting a short course session on devoted to “Heterogenous Integration Using Chiplets & Advanced Packaging”
A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed an analytical tool designed to improve the biomanufacturing process of advanced cell-based therapies.
Their Dynamic Sampling Platform provides a real time analysis of cells as they are modified and grown for treatment in a bioreactor, overcoming what currently is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive process. The team, led by principal investigator Andrei Fedorov, published a recent study about the Platform in Lab on a Chip, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech has announced the winners for the 2021 Fall Facility Seed Grants. The primary purpose of this program is to give first- or second-year graduate students in diverse disciplines working on original and un-funded research in micro- and nano-scale projects the opportunity to access the most advanced academic cleanroom space in the Southeast. In addition to accessing the high-level fabrication, lithography, and characterization tools in the labs, the awardees will have the opportunity to gain proficiency in cleanroom and tool methodology and access the consultation services provided by research staff members of the IEN. Seed Grant awardees are also provided travel support to present their research at a scientific conference.
In addition to student research skill development, this bi-annual grant program gives faculty with novel research topics the ability to develop preliminary data to pursue follow-up funding sources. The Facility Seed Grant program is supported by the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), a member of the National Science Foundation’s National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).
Since the start of the grant program in 2014, seventy-two projects from ten different schools in Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Engineering and Science, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 3 other universities, have been seeded.
The 4 winning projects in this round were awarded IEN cleanroom and lab access time to be used over the next year. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in semiconductor technology, opto-electronic materials and designs, quantum computing, and polymer nanostructures.
The Fall 2021 IEN Facility Seed Grant Award winners are:
In-situ Electron Microscopy Biasing Experiments on Ferroelectric Oxides on Ge Substrates
PI: Asif Khan and Joshua Kacher | Student: Nashrah Afroze
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering/School of Materials Science and Engineering
Fabrication of Dielectric Resonant Optical Metamaterials using 3D Printed Patterns
PI: Sourabh Saha | Student: Vidhukiran Venkataraman
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineerign
Realization of Microscale Mechanical Bistable Junction
PI: Chengzhi Shi | Student: Chenzhe Wang
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Fabrication and Characterization of Surface-Modified Polymers
PI: Akanksha Menon | Student: Walter Parker
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
The Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), is funded by NSF Grant ECCS-2025462.
This month we are celebrating another year of research and achievement here in our facilities. Over the past year we welcomed back our research community, as we took precautions and were able to safely and effectively re-open our doors! While the cleanroom was re-opened in 2020, this past year was the first full year back, and for that we are thankful. We have some exciting things planned for 2022, so be sure to keep an eye on SUMS!
Thanks, IEN Technical Staff
Holiday Hours
The Marcus Inorganic Cleanrom, GT Biocleanroom, and Pettit Microelectronics Cleanroom will be closed on Friday, December 24th, 2021 at 10pm and will reopen on Monday, January 3rd, 2022 at 8am.
Please make sure to schedule your cleanroom time accordingly. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks and have a wonderful winter break!
Russell Dupuis spoke about the evolution of LEDs and lighting, as well as its future applications, on Acast, a podcast hosted by Lord John Browne, director of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Dupuis holds the Steve W. Chaddick Endowed Chair in Electro-Optics and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Dupuis was named as a co-recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering earlier this year with his colleagues Nick Holonyak Jr. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Isamu Akasaki (Nagoya University and Meijo University in Japan), M. George Craford (Philips Lumileds Lighting Company), and Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara). They were recognized not only for the global impact of LED and solid-state lighting, but also for the tremendous contribution that LED technology has made, and will continue to make, to reducing energy consumption and addressing climate change.
Covid-19 vaccines are available to all Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff, as well as their family members ages 12 and older. Vaccine clinics are now taking place every Tuesday on campus.
Testing continues to be available during the summer. If you're on campus and have not been vaccinated, keep testing weekly to help make campus as safe and healthy as possible.
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Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology
Georgia Institute for Technology
Marcus Nanotechnology Building
345 Ferst Drive | Atlanta GA | 30332
Russell Dupuis spoke about the evolution of LEDs and lighting, as well as its future applications, on 
