The Electrostatic Discharge Association (ESDA) has awarded the 2011 international research award to Kaustav Banerjee, who serves as the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Nanoelectronics Research Lab Director as well as professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Professor Kaustav Banerjee (Credit:UCSB)
The research award for Kaustav Banerjee recognizes his novel ideas in preventing electrostatic discharge (ESD) in systems and integrated circuits (ICs). ESD is the major reason behind the failure of all ICs. As per the ESDA, ESD has a major impact on the production of the electronics industry, production costs, profitability, product quality and dependability.
Dr. Charvaka Duvvury, who is an ESDA Board Member and a Texas Instruments Fellow, stated that Banerjee’s innovative proposal to study graphene electronics’ electro-thermal behavior is on the right time and gained attention of technical experts in the ESD community. Dr. Harald Gossner, Intel Mobile Communications’ Senior Principal Engineering, stated that high-current experiments were already conducted on the graphene devices developed by Banerjee's team and surprised with the current conducting capability of carbon atom monolayer or bilayer. The findings also demonstrate the superior quality of the graphene synthesized by the team, he added.
Banerjee stated that although it is already known that graphene can maintain high current densities, there is virtually no data available about the electrostatic discharge and high current characteristics of graphene electronics. Such experiments are helpful to recognize the basic problems of graphene electronics and pave the way for new green solutions in the electronics industry such as his team’s innovative electrostatic discharge prevention solutions, he added.