A Mississippi State engineer is joining a federal government-supported research project involving a new frontier of technology that's both tiny and huge.

Dr. Stephen E. Saddow, director of the Emerging Materials Research Laboratory, recently received the university's first research award focusing specifically on nanotechnology to create materials on the scale of nanometers or one-billionth of a meter.

One-billionth of a meter! We're talking atoms and molecules here, folks!

Saddow will be collaborating with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., who earlier received the comprehensive Department of Defense grant to apply nanotechnology to the manufacture of compound semiconductors.

"Nanotechnology is both exciting and challenging because of the dimensions of the work, which involves the manipulation of matter a thousand times smaller than a human hair," Saddow said.

The five-year project is one of only 16 selected this year for funding by DOD's University Research Initiative on Nanotechnology, or DURINT. MSU's portion of the DURINT grant totals $625,000.

In addition to Mississippi State and Carnegie Mellon, the team includes scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University, universities of Pittsburgh and South Florida, and State University of New York at Albany.

Saddow said he and MSU team members will focus on the application of nanoporous buffer layers to silicon carbide and gallium-nitride semiconductors to improve their material properties.

Researchers at MSU's Emerging Materials Research Laboratory, working with colleagues at TDI Inc. in Maryland and Russia's Ioffe Institute earlier pioneered the use of nanotechnology to create a buffer layer between silicon carbide/gallium-nitride starting material and the electronics built into a semiconductor. They continue to work on further improving the process.