Once again, AttoSwitch shines for successful participation to the researcher’s night in Modena.
On Friday, September 25th, in the premises of the former San Gemignano monastery (now a modernly equipped University site), AttoSwitch researchers engaged with young boys and girls, primary and secondary school children, university students, researchers and the general public.
The AttoSwitch booth, previously advertised through the University media channels, focused on educating the general public on the marvellous world of transistors, showcasing how and why their invisible architecture has evolved to support functional scaling at the chip level. Through a series of new physical and virtual gaming experiences, displays of wafers, disassembled chips and components, Lego models, visual projections, and interactions with semi-professional design and analysis software, young researchers at the stand introduced participants to the fascinating, invisible marvels of electronics.
The importance of energy efficient computation in the age of AI was made engagingly tangible by Seme-Chess, a chess-inspired computer game to familiarize with the performance-energy trade-off in electronics developed by Rupam Goswami, a former visiting AttoSwitch researcher. Visitors to the booth could play with Seme-Chess on a large touch screen, using the MOSFET (King), tri-gate FinFET, GAA nanosheet and steep slope transistors as pieces. Younger visitors could assemble planar, FinFET and nanosheet transistors models in Lego demonstrators, using instruction booklets prepared ad-hoc to visualize their complex structure, which large SEM/TEM photographs showed their appearance and tiny dimensions. The evolution of transistor architectures toward better performance and efficiency, and the perspective use of Dirac and 2D materials was illustrated in a rolling presentation and commented by the young researchers working on the project. The booth attracted approximately 150 visitors of all ages, many being previously unaware of what a transistor is and why it is so important.
