DIASPORA

Drift in Amorphous Semiconductors - a Partnership with IBM Zurich

In 2013 the existing collaboration between Martin Salinga's team at RWTH Aachen University and a group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory was substantially intensified, when the European Commission granted funds for a four-year project called DIASPORA through the "industry-academia partnerships and pathways" program (IAPP).

The IAPP-program is a Marie Curie Action that seeks to enhance cooperation between public research organizations and private commercial enterprises. Based on longer-term cooperation knowledge sharing and mutual understanding in both industrial and academic sectors are increased. Participants in an IAPP are one or more research organizations (here RWTH Aachen University) and one or more commercial enterprises (here IBM) that propose a joint research project within which transfer of knowledge takes place. This transfer of knowledge is reached primarily through staff secondments (staff exchanges).

Main objective of our partnership with IBM is research on phase-change materials, which are currently a promising class of materials to be used as the next generation of memory and potentially even for neuromorphic computing. We aim to understand the underlying physics of the remarkable properties of these materials with a particular focus on the resistance drift in amorphized memory cells. More details about this collaboration can be found on the website of the DIASPORA-project.