l school on emerging nanotechnologies (ISEN2012) for energy-efficient information, communication and storage systems for the post-CMOS era and attracted the delegates of top-notch young scientists from all over the world. The ISEN2012 took place at the Shiinoki Cultural Complex in the historic city of Kanazawa and at the JAIST’s Ishikawa High-tech Centre for 26 – 29 March 2012. The delegates of about forty postgraduate students and postdoctoral research fellows attended the school from the UK, US, Korea, Oceania, Japan and played a very active role in discussing state-of-the-art nanotechnologies in the class and in presenting their recent research achievements at the poster session.
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Eight lectures delivered on 26 – 28 March by eminent academics and senior scientists addressed key aspects of the ISEN2012 theme which include atomically-controlled nanomaterials and nanodevices and heterogeneous integration of conventional CMOS and other emerging nanotechnologies. On the theme of ‘Beyond CMOS’ the lecturers discussed atom-scale nanotechnologies such as individual dopant atom control (by Prof. M. Tabe, Shizuoka University), single-electron charge and spin based quantum computation (by Dr. Andrew Ferguson, University of Cambridge), atomic switches (by Dr. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, NIMS) as well as emerging ‘monolayer’ nanomaterial platforms; grapheme (by Dr. Daiyu Kondo, AIST) and silicene (by Prof. Yukiko Takamura, JAIST). On the theme of ‘More than Moore’, three state-of-the-art hybrid nanotechnologies were discussed; nanophotovoltaics (by Prof. Darren Bagnall, Univ. of Southampton), ZnO nanowires (by Dr. Harold Chong, Univ. of Southampton) and hybrid NEMS (nano-electro-mechanical-systems) (by Prof. Hiroshi Mizuta, JAIST/Univ. of Southampton). All these lectures were run in an interactive manner, and the students have themselves been active part of the lectures by making questions and comments continuously throughout the lectures.
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The three-day long lecture series were followed by a one-day poster session held at JAIST on 29 March. The delegates presented their own research posters together with a couple of tens posters exhibited by the postgraduate students and research fellows from the School of Materials Science. An approximately 3-hour long poster session was extremely active and fruitful with intensive discussion and the exchange of useful information at the individual poster boards among the ISEN2012 delegates and the JAIST researchers. The delegates were also invited during the lunch break to the tour to the laboratories which introduced the JAIST’s state-of-the-art research facilities on material science.
Commenting on the significance of the ISEN2012 event, Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, ISEN2012 Organizer, said: “I believe this event went very successful by providing the young scientists with a unique opportunity to learn key emerging nanotechnologies for future green nanoelectronics in a systematic manner. It also succeeded to illustrate that we now have a ‘nanoscale’ clue to make our future information, communication and energy management systems far more functional and energy-efficient than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional CMOS technologies if we adopt unique properties of these emerging nanotechnologies”. The ISEN2012 has received a number of positive feedback from the delegates such as ‘It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience with great speakers and a wonderful first time in Japan’ (Mr Yun Peng Lin, the PhD student from University of Southampton, UK)’. ‘We are already looking forward to organizing the follow-up event in a couple of years time’, said Prof. Mizuta.
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