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The Oswego SD308 robotics team, 2338 Gear It Forward, competed at the 2023 FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in Houston, Texas. There are over 3,200 robotic teams worldwide; over 600 qualified and competed at the world championship. The team finished in the top 64 robots in the world.

In addition to qualifying for the world championship through regional competitions, the team earned an invitation after winning the Engineering Inspiration Award at the 7 Rivers Regional Event in LaCrosse, Wis.

The Engineering Inspiration Award is an award that celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a teams school or organization and community. This was awarded for the teams ability to spread the message of FIRST throughout the community as well as their involvement in passing legislation to have robotics supported and recognized on the third Friday in March in Illinois as Illinois FIRST Robotics Day.

FIRST works as a community to prepare young people for a STEM future and aims to ensure its programs have a lasting, positive impact as well as inspire the next generation of innovators and leaders. FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

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Missouri S&Ts Engineers Without Borders team will soon be on the move and traveling to both Bolivia and Ecuador in May.

These will be our teams first international trips since before the COVID-19 pandemic, says Anna Stephenson, a senior in chemical engineering who is the teams project lead for the trip to Atahuallani, Bolivia. Its something we are all excited about. Our group has volunteered for our projects remotely, and now we will have the opportunity to be in the field.

For the project in Bolivia, a previous group of students visited in 2019 to meet with the community and conduct a preliminary assessment of the situation in person. Then, students worked remotely with Bolivian engineers to develop and implement a gravity-fed water system for the Atahuallani community to use.

Stephenson says this provided the community with a safer, more readily available source of water. The groups next goal is to develop a latrine system, which will help with wastewater and potentially lower disease in the community.

In our upcoming trip, we will conduct the necessary assessments, monitor the current water system, and communicate with local residents through surveys and interviews to collect data about the communitys water usage, Stephenson says.

Eight students will be part of this trip, as well as two team advisers.

The work conducted in Agua Fra, Ecuador, has also related to clean water sources for local residents.

According to Cylan Burns, a senior in engineering management and multidisciplinary studies who is leading the efforts for the Ecuador trip, S&Ts team visited the country in 2018 and has since worked remotely to develop systems to collect rainwater for residents to use.

Thanks to the teams efforts, 12 homes, as well as a local school were equipped with these systems.

The next step will be to implement a gravity-fed pipeline for the community to have easier access to clean water from a local river, which should benefit local health and hygiene practices.

Before taking this step, the six students and one team adviser who make the trip will first have to conduct an assessment and see how the situation has changed since S&Ts visit five years ago.

Natalie Wohlgemuth, a senior in civil engineering and the groups acting president, says all of the students involved are appreciative of the support they receive for their efforts, as these initiatives would not be possible without funding from sponsors and individual donors.

The donations we receive will truly make an immeasurable difference in the lives of the people we are helping, she says. By donating, you are helping with these community members basic needs that most people in the United States could not imagine doing without for even a short time.

Wohlgemuth says S&Ts students take their efforts seriously and understand the impact the projects will have for community members in these countries for generations to come.

Our members pay for part of their trips out of their own pockets, and they are passionate about working to improve these communities, she says. We are developing infrastructure for these communities that will make a real difference for the residents.

Crowdfunding pages are currently live to contribute to the students efforts for both trips. To support S&Ts chapter of Engineers Without Borders, visit crowdfunding.mst.edu.

Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is a STEM-focused research university of over 7,000 students. Part of the four-campus University of Missouri System and located in Rolla, Missouri, Missouri S&T offers 101 degrees in 40 areas of study and is among the nations top 10 universities for return on investment, according to Business Insider. For more information about Missouri S&T, visit http://www.mst.edu.

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Emerging AI applications, like chatbots that generate natural human language, demand denser, more powerful computer chips. But semiconductor chips are traditionally made with bulk materials, which are boxy 3D structures, so stacking multiple layers of transistors to create denser integrations is very difficult.

However, semiconductor transistors made from ultrathin 2D materials, each only about three atoms in thickness, could be stacked up to create more powerful chips. To this end, MIT researchers have now demonstrated a novel technology that can effectively and efficiently grow layers of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials directly on top of a fully fabricated silicon chip to enable denser integrations.

Growing 2D materials directly onto a silicon CMOS wafer has posed a major challenge because the process usually requires temperatures of about 600 degrees Celsius, while silicon transistors and circuits could break down when heated above 400 degrees. Now, the interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a low-temperature growth process that does not damage the chip. The technology allows 2D semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated on top of standard silicon circuits.

In the past, researchers have grown 2D materials elsewhere and then transferred them onto a chip or a wafer. This often causes imperfections that hamper the performance of the final devices and circuits. Also, transferring the material smoothly becomes extremely difficult at wafer-scale. By contrast, this new process grows a smooth, highly uniform layer across an entire 8-inch wafer.

The new technology is also able to significantly reduce the time it takes to grow these materials. While previous approaches required more than a day to grow a single layer of 2D materials, the new approach can grow a uniform layer of TMD material in less than an hour over entire 8-inch wafers.

Due to its rapid speed and high uniformity, the new technology enabled the researchers to successfully integrate a 2D material layer onto much larger surfaces than has been previously demonstrated. This makes their method better-suited for use in commercial applications, where wafers that are 8 inches or larger are key.

Using 2D materials is a powerful way to increase the density of an integrated circuit. What we are doing is like constructing a multistory building. If you have only one floor, which is the conventional case, it wont hold many people. But with more floors, the building will hold more people that can enable amazing new things. Thanks to the heterogenous integration we are working on, we have silicon as the first floor and then we can have many floors of 2D materials directly integrated on top, says Jiadi Zhu, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student and co-lead author of a paper on this new technique.

Zhu wrote the paper with co-lead-author Ji-Hoon Park, an MIT postdoc; corresponding authors Jing Kong, professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory for Electronics; and Toms Palacios, professor of EECS and director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL); as well as others at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Ericsson Research. The paper appears today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Slim materials with vast potential

The 2D material the researchers focused on, molybdenum disulfide, is flexible, transparent, and exhibits powerful electronic and photonic properties that make it ideal for a semiconductor transistor. It is composed of a one-atom layer of molybdenum sandwiched between two atoms of sulfide.

Growing thin films of molybdenum disulfide on a surface with good uniformity is often accomplished through a process known as metal-organic chemical vapor deposition(MOCVD). Molybdenum hexacarbonyl and diethylene sulfur, two organic chemical compounds that contain molybdenum and sulfur atoms, vaporize and are heated inside the reaction chamber, where they decompose into smaller molecules. Then they link up through chemical reactions to form chains of molybdenum disulfide on a surface.

But decomposing these molybdenum and sulfur compounds, which are known as precursors, requires temperatures above 550 degrees Celsius, while silicon circuits start to degrade when temperatures surpass 400 degrees.

So, the researchers started by thinking outside the box they designed and built an entirely new furnace for the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition process.

The oven consists of two chambers, a low-temperature region in the front, where the silicon wafer is placed, and a high-temperature region in the back. Vaporized molybdenum and sulfur precursors are pumped into the furnace. The molybdenum stays in the low-temperature region, where the temperature is kept below 400 degrees Celsius hot enough to decompose the molybdenum precursor but not so hot that it damages the silicon chip.

The sulfur precursor flows through into the high-temperature region, where it decomposes. Then it flows back into the low-temperature region, where the chemical reaction to grow molybdenum disulfide on the surface of the wafer occurs.

You can think about decomposition like making black pepper you have a whole peppercorn and you grind it into a powder form. So, we smash and grind the pepper in the high-temperature region, then the powder flows back into the low-temperature region, Zhu explains.

Faster growth and better uniformity

One problem with this process is that silicon circuits typically have aluminum or copper as a top layer so the chip can be connected to a package or carrier before it is mounted onto a printed circuit board. But sulfur causes these metals to sulfurize, the same way some metals rust when exposed to oxygen, which destroys their conductivity. The researchers prevented sulfurization by first depositing a very thin layer of passivation material on top of the chip. Then later they could open the passivation layer to make connections.

They also placed the silicon wafer into the low-temperature region of the furnace vertically, rather than horizontally. By placing it vertically, neither end is too close to the high-temperature region, so no part of the wafer is damaged by the heat. Plus, the molybdenum and sulfur gas molecules swirl around as they bump into the vertical chip, rather than flowing over a horizontal surface. This circulation effect improves the growth of molybdenum disulfide and leads to better material uniformity.

In addition to yielding a more uniform layer, their method was also much faster than other MOCVD processes. They could grow a layer in less than an hour, while typically the MOCVD growth process takes at least an entire day.

Using the state-of-the-art MIT.Nano facilities, they were able to demonstrate high material uniformity and quality across an 8-inch silicon wafer, which is especially important for industrial applications where bigger wafers are needed.

By shortening the growth time, the process is much more efficient and could be more easily integrated into industrial fabrications. Plus, this is a silicon-compatible low-temperature process, which can be useful to push 2D materials further into the semiconductor industry, Zhu says.

In the future, the researchers want to fine-tune their technique and use it to grow many stacked layers of 2D transistors. In addition, they want to explore the use of the low-temperature growth process for flexible surfaces, like polymers, textiles, or even papers. This could enable the integration of semiconductors onto everyday objects like clothing or notebooks.

This work made an important progress in the synthesis technology of monolayer molybdenum disulfide material, says Han Wang, the Robert G. and Mary G. Lane Endowed Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California, who was not involved with this research. The new capability of low thermal budget growth on an 8-inch scale enables the back-end-of-line integration of this material with silicon CMOS technology and paves the way for its future electronics application.

This work is partially funded by the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, Ericsson, MITRE, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The project also benefitted from the support of TSMC University Shuttle.

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Pair from Thunder Bay school selected by Engineering Institute of Canada for contributions to the field

Two of Lakehead University's professors have been recognized by the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) for their contributions to the field of engineering.

Abdelhamid Tayebi and Mohammad Uddin were inducted as Fellows at the 2023 EIC Awards Gala in Ottawa on April 22.

Receiving thedesignation of Fellowis an acknowledgement given to engineers in recognition of their excellence in engineering and their services to the profession and to society, according to the EIC.

Tayebi is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and is the founder and director of Lakehead Universitys Robotics and Automatic Control Laboratory. His current research interests are in the areas of control systems, cooperative control, iterative learning control, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

I am humbled and honoured to be recognized by this prestigious EIC Fellowship. For this recognition, Im grateful to the support from my graduate students and research collaborators, my colleagues, and research sponsors, Tayebi said in an April 25 news release.

Over the last 23 years at Lakehead University, I have had the privilege of mentoring a large number of young engineers and graduate students who have moved on to successful academic and industrial careers. Im proud of all of them and Im sure that many will one day be recognized with this Fellowship.

Uddin is also a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and serves as coordinator of the electrical engineering program with the Lakehead-Georgian Partnership. He is the director of the Renewable Energy, Power Systems and Drive Research Lab located in Barrie, Ont.

Im really pleased to receive this award, Uddin said in the release. I am grateful to Lakehead University for providing me the opportunity to continue my research. Im also thankful to the EIC Fellow selection committee members for choosing me for the award.

Founded in 1887, the EIC is the oldest engineering association in the country and is a federation of 12 engineering societies, representing more than 160,000 engineers across Canada.

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