Uwe Kortshagen and Suo Yang Receive Genesis Mission Award
The Department of Mechanical Engineering is proud to announce that Professors Uwe Kortshagen and Suo Yang have received a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission award for their project, “AI-driven rapid discovery of plasma deposition for novel materials for next-generation semiconductor devices.”
Designed to double America’s scientific productivity, the Genesis Mission is a Department of Energy initiative that brings together the Department’s world-class scientific capabilities, advanced AI, high-performance computing, and the nation’s leading researchers to transform how scientific discovery is conducted and strengthen American leadership in science and technology.
The $293 million Genesis Mission Request for Applications invited interdisciplinary teams to address more than 20 national challenges spanning advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, and quantum information science. It generated the largest response to a funding opportunity in Department of Energy history. Following a rigorous merit review process, 278 projects were selected, including 168 led by universities.
Phase I awards range from $500,000 to $750,000 and support a nine-month project period. Successful Phase I teams are eligible to compete for larger Phase II awards, which range from $6 million to $15 million over a three-year project period.
The team’s project addresses a critical bottleneck in semiconductor manufacturing. Plasma-processing accounts for a large fraction of all processing steps in modern semiconductor devices, but as the industry moves toward smaller feature sizes, transformative device architectures, and high-power applications, successfully integrating novel materials has become a formidable challenge. A single plasma process can require tens to one hundred parameters to be optimized or controlled, and traditional trial-and-error approaches that rely on human intuition are prohibitively inefficient and expensive.
The project aims to establish a fully autonomous, closed-loop, AI-enabled agentic discovery workflow for the deposition of emerging semiconductor materials using plasma-based processes. The AI-driven approach is expected to provide a 10x speed-up compared to traditional human-driven optimization methods, converging to optimal plasma reactor settings within 20–30 autonomous iterations, reducing the timeframe for plasma process discovery from months or years to weeks.
Successful completion of the Phase I project will validate a universal AI framework for plasma-enabled manufacturing, directly supporting the recentering of microelectronics manufacturing in the United States.
The project brings together researchers from three University of Minnesota departments, a national laboratory, and an industry partner:
University of Minnesota: Professor Uwe Kortshagen (ME, PI), Professor Suo Yang (ME, Co-I), Professor Chris Bartel (Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Co-I), and Professor Gang Qiu (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Co-I).
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory: Dr. Igor Kaganovich, Principal Research Physicist.
Physical Electronics, Inc. (PHI): Dr. David Valley, Senior Scientist.