Although the advancement of CMOS technology during the last three decades has dramatically improved our daily lives in almost every aspect, it has encountered increasing technical challenges in continuous miniaturization down to sub-0.1 µm and beyond. GNS's research and development team focuses on technologies 5-30 years in the future, drives the advancement of its high-performance CMOS technologies to smaller geometries, and strives for higher performance. Research programs are focused on providing near-term and long-term solutions to the most challenging issues facing the semiconductor industry, such as high dielectric constant materials, advanced gate stacks, floating gates, advanced silicide technology, advanced lithography, vertical transistors, strained silicon, and other novel device structures.

Monolithic integration of photonics with electronics on a single substrate is highly desirable. Optical devices have always been the realm of exotic III-V materials such as indium, gallium, and so forth, whose fabrication is incompatible with advanced electronics of silicon. The GNS scientists seek to provide monolithic integration strategies of photonics devices and subsystems on a single silicon substrate, made of III-V materials, silicon, silicon, and/or Si-based materials for high speed data communication and signal processing.