BITS Pilani Rajasthan Alumnus receives ISA Techno Visionary Award

PRLog (Press Release) – At Stanford from where he obtained his M.S. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering, he has been Rickey / Nielsen Professor in the School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering (by courtesy), Associate Director of the NSF/SRC Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing and an expert in the leadership council of the MARCO/DARPA-funded Focus Center for Materials, Structurs, and nano-Devices.

His research interests include new and innovative materials, structures, and process technology of silicon, germanium and III-V devices and interconnects for nanoelectronics.

He has worked on modeling of CVD of silicon, conduction in polysilicon, diffusion in silicides, contact resistance; interconnect delay and 2-D oxidation effects in silicon. He pioneered the technologies for aluminum / titanium layered interconnects, CVD of tungsten silicide MOS gates, CVD tungsten MOS gates and tunable work function SiGe MOS gates.

During the late 80s he became interested in the economics and technology of single wafer manufacturing. He developed equipment and simulators for single wafer thermal processing, deposition and etching and technology for the in-situ measurements and real-time control. Jointly with Texas Instruments a micro factory for single wafer manufacturing was demonstrated in 1993.

Since the mid 90s his group has been working on new materials, devices and interconnects for scaling MOS technology to nm range. He has pioneered several new concepts of 3-D ICs with multiple layers of heterogeneous devices. His group has demonstrated the first high performance germanium MOSFETs with high-k dielectrics.

He is a Fellow of IEEE, member of the Electrochemical Society and the Materials Research Society. He received the Thomas D. Callinan Award by the Electrochemical Society in May 2000 for his contributions to the dielectric science and technology and the 2004 IEEE Andrew Grove Award for seminal contributions to silicon process technology. He was co-editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices during 1988 - 1990. He has guided more than 60 doctoral students and has authored / co-authored over 500 Technical Papers of which six have received Best Paper Award. He has been the D. J. Gandhi Chair Visiting Professor during the summer of 2007 at IIT Bombay, India.

The Technovation awards, instituted jointly by the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) and the VLSI Society of India (VSI) aims at building the Indian semiconductor eco-system and encouraging the academic fraternity for its development.

For the outstanding research work and contributions in nano-technology, three-dimensional integrated circuits technology, single wafer manufacturing for a micro-factory and thin film technology for VLSI inter-connections and contacts, its no wonder that he has been chosen by the ISA-VSI panel for the first Techno Visionary lifetime award which carries a citation and a cash prize of Rs 5,00,000 ($12,500).

He is none other than Proud to be a BITSian Dr Krishna C Saraswat who got his Electronics Engineering Bachelors degree in 1968 from BITS Pilani Rajasthan. His love for his alma mater is evident from the fact that he continues his association as an Adjunct Professor for the institution from where he graduated four decades ago.

Dr Krishna Saraswat who has integrated himself into the excellence circuit is indeed a proud alumnus of BITS Pilani and in the times to come, he is bound to climb more peaks.