Sanjay Banerjee, director of The University of Texas at Austin’s Microelectronics Research Center, has garnered a four-year, $300,000 renewal of the Micron Professorship he has held since 2001.
The continued support from the Micron Technology Foundation, Inc. provides the holder of the Cockrell Family Regents Chair with unrestricted funds to pursue advanced microelectronics research.
“Sanjay’s was the first Micron Professorship to be funded, and the first to be renewed for a full term,” said Dan Spangler, university relations manager for the Micron Technology Foundation. He noted that the foundation has invested more than $1 million in Texas educational institutions since 1999.
Banerjee is using the support to fund studies at the Microelectronics Research Center on advanced transistors that are essential for improving flash memory chips and other devices.
“You want the transistors to be smaller and faster, while hopefully using less power,” he said.
To achieve this, Banerjee and other center engineers are developing transistors that combine silicon with other materials to provide improved mechanical and electrical properties. The combinations involve silicon and germanium, or silicon, germanium and carbon alloys.
The Micron funding will also support the researchers’ activities to develop insulating materials that work better than silicon dioxide at preventing leakage of electrons through the gate of transistors. For this research, Banerjee and colleagues are pursuing theoretical computer models of the behavior of hafnium dioxide and zirconium dioxide as alternative insulating materials.
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About UT's Cockrell School of Engineering:
The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering ranks among the top six public engineering schools in the United States. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty elected members of the National Academy of Engineering, the School's more than 7,000 students gain exposure to the nation's finest engineering practitioners. Appropriately, the School's logo, an embellished checkmark used by the first UT engineering dean to denote high quality student work, is the nation's oldest quality symbol. The School maintains a Web site at http://www.engr.utexas.edu