SOUTH BEND -- State and local leaders announced the establishment of a Midwest Academy of Nanoelectronics and Architectures, a new research consortium that will be led by the University of Notre Dame.

The group’s mission is to discover and develop the next nanoscale logic device, the basic building block of smaller, faster computers of the future.

Gov. Mitch Daniels and other state and local leaders hailed the announcement as an economic development coup for the Midwest, saying the consortium will result in additional federal money for Midwestern universities and potentially bring well-paying, high-technology jobs to South Bend and the region.

Notre Dame will be the lead player in the consortium, which also includes Purdue University, the University of Illinois, Penn State University, the University of Michigan, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Direct financial support for MANA from the public and private sectors and the participating universities will total more than $25 million over three years, according to the planners. Notre Dame also will offer additional support.

Consortium organizers anticipate that more money will come through federal grant applications under the National Nanotechnology Initiative, for which the federal government plans to allocate $1.5 billion a year.

Three other nanoelectronics research initiatives exist in the United States, based in Los Angeles; Austin, Texas; and Albany, N.Y.

Thousands of jobs have been created in Albany since the opening of its NRI center, said Jeff Welser, director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative of the Semiconductor Research Corp., who is on assignment from IBM. He said the same could happen in the South Bend region.

“These centers are all about setting the stage for the future of electronics,” he said. “Indiana is now the Midwest center for this work. You guys are the Midwest.”

Conventional microelectronic technology has relied on shrinking transistors to produce increasingly smaller, faster and cheaper devices ranging from cell phones and personal music devices to laptop computers. That approach is nearing its physical limits.

MANA’s mission will be to explore and develop advanced devices, circuits and nanosystems with performance capabilities beyond current devices. In the next three to five years, the research taking place in the Midwest today will evolve into prototyping activity that area officials hope will remain not only in the Midwest but right here in Michiana.

“By the middle of the year, we would hope we’d have initiatives moving in a number of different places to identify strategies we think will help us capture those jobs and that business activity,” said Pat McMahon, executive director of Project Future. “If we’re successful in capturing this, it will bring thousands of new jobs to the community and transition thousands of jobs that are already here.”

McMahon also framed the announcement in historic terms.

“From an economic development perspective, we see this as the most significant venture that the community has had the opportunity to pursue in the last 150 years,” he said.

“We have been a manufacturing town that has made some transitions, but we don’t want to be stuck in the past,” McMahon said. “I don’t think we will be the same community 20 years from now in what drives our community’s economy, jobs and wealth creation. This has so much potential to cross all aspects of our community that I don’t think anything can hold a candle to it.”

MANA is expected to closely tie Notre Dame to local and state economic development initiatives. When MANA research results in start-up businesses, they are expected to launch in the planned Innovation Park at Notre Dame -- a technology park planned along Edison Road south of campus.

Some commercial ventures resulting from the research also may occur in a nanoelectronic development facility the city is developing in the former Studebaker Corridor area near downtown.

Notre Dame has a heavy research focus on nanoelectronics. The university’s Center for Nano Science and Technology, established in 1999, explores the fundamental concepts of nanoscience to develop unique engineering applications using nano principles. The center is composed of a multidisciplinary team of researchers from various science and engineering fields.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for us to discover and shape the development of nanaoelectronics and to make it happen here in the Midwest,” said Alan Seabaugh, a Notre Dame professor of electrical engineering, who will serve as principal investigator for the project.

This new venture is part of the Semiconductor Research Corp.’s Nanoelectronics Research Initiative. SRC is a consortium of six major companies in the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing business: IBM, Intel, Micron, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD and Freescale.