A cross-cutting initiative at UVA Engineering

The Multifunctional Materials Integration Initiative brings together researchers in UVA's School of Engineering who tightly co-design technologies across length scales to enable the next generation of integrated systems and achieve “more than Moore.” By tightly coupling multiple disparate materials and integrated processes, they can create hybrid technologies that enable performance, functionalities and applications that are not possible with a single process, at a similar cost scale.

Multi-functional integration fast-tracks the development of experimental devices, integrating promising materials with more mature, robust technologies, to reach system-level designs long before they would be feasible as stand-alone technologies. These nanoscale-to-macroscale integrated systems span the full electromagnetic spectrum from DC to daylight. Our designers work across traditional material platforms, such as semiconductors, oxides and soft matter, necessitating collaboration between traditional disciplines both horizontally, e.g., electron-based researchers collaborating with phonon- spin-based researchers, collaborating with researchers on harsh environments and energy transport, as well as vertically at various levels of complexity and abstraction.