Kaustav at the Dead Sea

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   kaustav@ece.ucsb.edu

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   4151 Harold Frank Hall
      University of California, Santa Barbara
      Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9560

Biography

Kaustav Banerjee is one of the world’s leading innovators in the field of nanoelectronics. At present, he is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Nanoelectronics Research Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research blends the physics, technology, and applications of quantum engineered van der Waals materials and heterostructures for next-generation energy-efficient electronics. Initially trained as a physicist, he graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in electrical engineering (minors in physics and materials science) in 1999. Subsequently, he worked at Stanford University as a Research Associate at the Center for Integrated Systems, with cross-appointments in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and joined the faculty at UCSB in 2002, where he has been a Full Professor since 2007.

Professor Banerjee has made seminal contributions toward extending the frontiers of energy-efficient electronics by identifying unique solutions that traverse diverse disciplines, ranging from nanomaterials and low-dimensional physics to novel devices, circuits, and chip-design methods and architectures. His ideas and inventions have played a decisive role in steering worldwide research and development efforts with remarkable societal and economic implications. Particularly, several of his early contributions to nanoscale interconnect modeling, design, and extraction have been extensively adopted by the industry. He is also widely recognized as one of the key visionaries behind the 3D IC technology being employed by the semiconductor industry for increasing energy-efficiency, functionality, and heterogeneous integration, as well as the pioneer behind thermal-aware design methods and tools used in the IC design industry.

Kaustav in Toyama - Feb 2017
Kaustav in Toyama - Feb 2017

Professor Banerjee has also spearheaded the use of nanomaterials for overcoming power dissipation and other fundamental challenges in nanoelectronics. This includes the invention of the kinetic inductor, which exploits the kinetic inductance of graphene at room temperature leading to the highest inductance-density materials ever made, that helped overcome a 200-year old limitation of the Faraday inductors and has opened up a new pathway for designing ultra-compact IoT systems (Nature Electronics 2018). Other innovations from his lab are the world’s thinnest channel (only two atomic layers of MoS2) band-to-band tunneling transistor that overcame a fundamental power consumption challenge in all electronic devices since the invention of the first transistor (Nature 2015), the first 2D-semiconductor channel based FET-biosensor with unprecedented sensitivity and promise of single-molecule detection (ACS Nano 2014), as well as a breakthrough interconnect technology based on doped-multilayer-graphene, which overcomes the fundamental limitations of conventional metals and provides an attractive pathway toward energy-efficient and highly reliable interconnects for next-generation integrated circuits (Nano Letters 2017). His recent demonstration of CMOS-compatible graphene has brought this material to the brink of large-scale deployment in the semiconductor industry (IEDM 2018).

Professor Banerjee’s research is chronicled in over 350 papers in professional journals, including many high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Electronics, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Physical Review X, and Proceedings of IEEE; as well as highly selective international conferences, such as IEDM where he has been one of the leading contributors with over 45 papers. Professor Banerjee has been a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society since 2008. He has delivered over 350 keynote/plenary lectures, panel talks, tutorials, and invited talks at numerous international conferences and leading venues around the world. Professor Banerjee’s highly cited works have been highlighted in numerous scientific and popular news media, including Nature News & Views, Nature Nanotechnology Research Highlights, Nature Electronics Research Highlights, Scientific Reports Top 100, Physics Today, IEEE Spectrum, EE Times, Science Daily, R&D Magazine, Physics World, National Radio, NSF, NAE, Japan’s NEDO, and The Economist. His most recent invention of the graphene kinetic inductor has been called “a trillion dollar breakthrough” by the Forbes magazine and included amongst the five inventions in the early 21st century that are already beginning to transform our modern world

Professor Banerjee is an elected Fellow of IEEE, the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His ideas and innovations have been recognized with numerous other accolades, including the prestigious Bessel Prize, presented to him as one of five engineers worldwide in 2011 by the Humboldt Foundation, Germany, for his outstanding contributions to nanoelectronics, the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, and selection as a JSPS Fellow by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2013, for his innovative research on 2D materials and devices. In 2019, he was identified amongst the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds by Web of Science, Clarivate Analytics.

Among the dozen-odd PhD students he has mentored, three are recipients of the IEEE EDS PhD Student Fellowship Award, and three have received the Lancaster Award - UCSB’s highest honor for PhD dissertations completed within a 2-year period covering all areas of engineering, physical sciences, and mathematics.

 

Complete List of Honors & Recognitions:

2020   Thesis Advisor to Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Award Winner, Junkai Jiang  
 
2019   World’s Most Influential Researchers, Identified by Web of  Science, Clarivate Analytics (Top 0.1% of all  researchers globally)  
 
2019   SRC/EDS Best Poster Award (awarded to PhD students Junkai Jiang and Kunjesh Agashiwala) for the poster titled,
           “CMOS-compatible Graphene Interconnects and Inductors for Next-Generation ICs,”
           presented at IEDM 2019 - SRC/EDS Student Showcase Poster Session  
 
2018   Specially Appointed Professor, School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan  
 
2018   Thesis Advisor to IEEE S3S Best Student Paper Award  Winner, Junkai Jiang  

2018   Thesis Advisor to IEEE EDS PhD Fellowship Award  Winner, Junkai Jiang  

2018   Thesis Advisor to Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Award  Winner, Jiahao Kang  

 
2018   Thesis Advisor to 2017 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad  Winner, Wei Cao  

2018   Thesis Advisor to UCSB Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship  Winner, Junkai Jiang  

2018   Thesis Advisor to Deblina Sarkar, Technology Review's India's Top 10 Innovators Under Age 35                    

2017   Specially Appointed Professor, World Research Hub Initiative (WRHI), Tokyo Tech, Japan

2017   Thesis Advisor to 2016 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad  Winner, Jiahao Kang

2016   Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

2016   Thesis Advisor to Peter J. Frenkel Foundation Fellowship Winner, Jiahao Kang
            (Institute for Energy Efficiency, UCSB)
 
2016   DRESDEN Senior Fellow, TU-Dresden, Germany
 
2016   Thesis Advisor to IEEE EDS PhD Fellowship Award Winner, Jiahao Kang
 
2016   Erasmus Mundus Visiting Professor Fellowship, Nanoscience & Nanotechnology,
           TU-Dresden, Germany
 
2016   Thesis Advisor to Deblina Sarkar, recognized for one of the top 3 dissertations throughout USA  and Canada,
           in the field of Mathematics, Physical sciences and Engineering (all departments) by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS),
           during the period 2014-2016
 
2016   Thesis Advisor to Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Award Winner, Deblina Sarkar
 
2015   IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (one of IEEE’s highest honors)
 
2015   Thesis Advisor to MRS Graduate Student Silver Award Winner, Deblina Sarkar (Fall 2015)
 
            (with advisee Navin Srivastava)
 
2015   National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Frontiers of Engineering (FOE), Alum
 
 
2013   JSPS Invitation Fellowship (Short-Term), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
 
 
 
 
 
2011   Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany
 
2011   Thesis Advisor to IEEE EDS PhD Fellowship Award Winner, Deblina Sarkar
 
2010   Thesis Advisor to Peter J. Frenkel Foundation Fellowship Winner, Hamed Dadgour
             (Institute for Energy Efficiency, UCSB)
 
2009   Thesis Advisor to UCSB Award of Distinction Recipient, Hamed Dadgour
 
 
 
             (with advisees Navin Srivastava and Sheng-Chih Lin)
 
2005   Recognized Visionary behind Silicon Valley Startup "Gradient Design Automation",
             acquired in 2014 by Keysight Technologies (a spin off from Agilent Technologies)
 
2005   Thesis Advisor to Outstanding Student Paper Award Winners,
             Sungjun Im and Navin Srivastava, VLSI/ULSI Multilevel Interconnect Conference
 
 
             as Chief Technology Officer of Gradient Design
 
2002   Runner-up, BASES Challenge 2002:
             as Chief Technology Officer of Gradient Design
 
2001   Best Paper Award, 38th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference

Teaching

Introduction to CMOS digital VLSI design: CMOS devices and manufacturing technology; transistor level design of static and dynamic logic gates and components and interconnections; circuit characterization: delay, noise margins, and power dissipation; combinational and sequential circuits; arithmetic operations and memories.
Nanometer scale issues in digital VLSI design: Scaled CMOS devices and technologies including high-k/metal gate, strained-Si, channel and substrate engineering, ultra-thin-body SOI, double-gate (FinFETs) and multi-gate FETs including nanosheet-FETs, nanowire-FETs, Schottky- and ballistic-FETs; device-circuit co-design for non-classical CMOS technologies; clock and power distribution; nanoscale circuit/system design issues including variability, thermal management, interconnects, and reliability; principles of ultra low-power design, subthreshold design and sub-kT/q operation--tunnel-FETs, NEM-FETs, IMOS etc; emerging memory technologies; heterogeneous integration using 3D ICs; neuromorphic ICs.
Basic quantum phenomena and solid-state physics; physics of low-dimensional materials; electrical and thermal transport in nanostructures, simulation methods including non-equilibrium green's function (NEGF) formalism, ab-initio techniques such as DFT; nanofabrication and characterization techniques including AFM, Raman, SEM, TEM, and XPS; emerging nanomaterials and structures (1D, 2D, etc) including carbon nanotubes and graphene, h-BN, graphene nanoribbons, two-dimensional transition metal di-chalcogenides (TMDC) such as MoS2, WSe2 etc; applications of emerging nanomaterials in electronics, photonics, bioelectronics, energy, and sensing.