Prof. Muhammad A. Alam of The Jai N. Gupta professorship at Purdue University

By early 2000s, many researchers would begin their talks with an iconic cartoon that compared the power dissipation of an IC, with that of a rocket nozzle and the Sun. The message was clear: the voltage must be scaled to keep power-dissipation at bay. Fast forward to 2017 – the tyranny of short channel effects at the sub 32 nm nodes has led to the development of FINFET and ETSOI technologies, with Si Nanosheet-FET and gate-all-around III-V transistors on the horizon. The short channel effects are controlled, but at the expense of additional self-heating of the system. Stacks of materials (many poor thermal conductors) now surround the very hot channel to make the bad situation worse. In this talk, I explain how self-heating redefines and conflates the traditional notions of performance and reliability of transistors and frontend and backend reliability of modern ICs. I will also explain how high-frequency operation and novel biomimetic heat-dissipation strategies may help manage this emerging performance and reliability challenge for sub-20nm technologies.

References of many of the topics discussed can be found at http://nanohub.org/resources/16560 and at http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~alam/

Biography:

Professor Alam holds the Jai N. Gupta professorship at Purdue University, where his research focuses on the physics and technology of semiconductor devices. From 1995 to 2003, he was with Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, as a Member of Technical Staff in the Silicon ULSI Research Department. Since joining Purdue in 2004,  Dr. Alam has published over 300 papers and has presented many invited and contributed talks. He is a fellow of IEEE, APS, and AAAS. His awards include the 2006 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Medal for contributions to device technology and 2015 SRC Technical Excellence Award for fundamental contributions to reliability physics. Prof. Alam has made important contributions to graduate education -- more than 125,000 students worldwide have learned some aspect of semiconductor devices from his web-enabled courses.

Email:

Address:Purdue University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 465 Northwestern Ave., West Lafayette, United States, 47907

Prof. Muhammad A. Alam of The Jai N. Gupta professorship at Purdue University

Biography:

Email:

Address:West Lafayette, United States