Title: Convergence of Bio-Nano-Information Technologies in the “More than Moore” Era
Speaker: Dr. V.Ramgopal Rao, Institute Chair Professor, EE Department, IIT Bombay

About the Speaker:
Dr. V. Ramgopal Rao is an Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay and the Chief Investigator for the Centre of Excellence in Nanoelectronics project at IIT Bombay. Dr. Rao has over 300 publications in the area of Electron Devices & Nanoelectronics in refereed international journals and conference proceedings and has 15 patentseither awarded or pending.
Prof. Rao received the coveted Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences (the highest scientific award for researchers in India) awarded by the Hon'ble Prime Minister, Govt of India in 2005 for his work on Electron Devices. He is also a recipient of the 2004 Swarnajayanti Fellowship award from DST, 2007 IBM Faculty award, the 2008 MRSI-ICSC Annual Prize, the 2009 Techno-Mentor award from the Indian Semiconductor Association and the 2010 DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator award. He is an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in the CMOS Devices and Technology area and serves on the Editorial boards of various other international journals. Dr. Rao is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of IETE. He is a Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Electron Devices Society and interacts closely with many semiconductor industries including Intel, IBM, Infineon, Applied Materials and Texas Instruments. He has served on the program/organizing committees of a large number of international conferences in the area of electron devices and was Chairman, IEEE AP/ED Bombay Chapter during 2002-2003. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Bombay Section besides being the vice-chair, IEEE Asia-Pacific Regions/Chapters Subcommittee.
For more information about Prof. Rao’s current research activities and a list of publications, please visit http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~rrao. E-mail: rrao@ee.iitb.ac.in.

About the topic:

As we pursue the Nanoelectronics research,  one thing that becomes apparent is the convergence of multiple disciplines and the need for collaborations with researchers from diverse backgrounds. For example, even the traditional Integrated Circuit (IC) technologies, which are considered to be the domain of Electrical Engineers, are undergoing a rapid transformation. As the scaling governed by Moore’s Law slows down owing to the huge cost, power and variability constraints, “More Than Moore” approach, which focuses on system level integration rather than transistor density, is gaining ground. The key idea is to achieve a functional diversification on the chip by empowering the conventional integrated circuit technologies with a variety of “sense & interact” functions.  For example, imagine a mobile phone that can do water quality sensing or provides you information about the quality of air you breathe or even warns you of the presence of explosives or an impending heart attack!
As part of this talk, we will look at some of these sensing platforms for healthcare and security applications and further look at the possibility of their integration with conventional IC technologies. At IIT Bombay, we have been working on a novel process flow for realization of a highly sensitive piezo-resistive polymer composite based nano-mechanical sensor platform that can be integrated with the conventional IC (CMOS) technologies. Electro-mechanical characterization of the fabricated microcantilevers yielded a resonance frequency which is a few tens of kHz and a deflection sensitivity in the range of 1.1 ppm ΔR/R for a nanometer of deflection. These nano-mechanical sensors have been used for a range of applications focusing on the detection of explosive molecules such as TNT/RDX in the part-per-trillion level of concentrations to developing an integrated system to provide point-of-care diagnostic support for cardiovascular diseases.  

INVITED TALK

Title: A Review on Nanoparticle Embedded Gate Dielectric MOS Non-Volatile Memories
Speaker: Dr. Chandan Kumar Sarkar

About the Speaker:

Chandan Kumar Sarkar (SM’87) received the M.Sc. degree in physics from the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India, in 1975, the Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University, Kolkata, India, in 1979, and the D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., in 1983. He was a Research Fellow of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 at the Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, from 1983 to 1985. He was also a Visiting Fellow with the Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden. He joined Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in 1987 as a Reader in electronics and telecommunication engineering and became a Professor and the Head of the Department of Physics, Bengal Engineering College (currently Bengal Engineering and Science University), Howrah, India, in 1996. Since 1999, he has been a Professor with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, Jadavpur University. He has served as a Visiting Professor in many universities and  has published around 100 papers in referred journals. Dr. Sarkar is the Chair of the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS), Calcutta Chapter. He serves as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE EDS. For detailed research activity, list of publications, International Collaborations of Prof. Sarkar, visit: http://www.ndslju.org

About the Topic:

Since the entry of the first MOS based static memory chips in the semiconductor market in 1968 there has been rapid growth in this sector. In 1985 the flash memory technology was invented by Toshiba. In 1988, Intel shipped the first NOR flash memory chips. This was soon followed by the introduction of the NAND flash memory by Toshiba in1989. Since then the Flash memories have gone on to claim a considerable share of the semiconductor memory market. Among the different types of Flash memories over the years the SONOS and the Floating Gate (FG) MOS structures have gained considerable prominence. However with the challenges posed by the aggressive scaling, new challenges (like leakage through ultra-thin tunnel oxides, high F-N stress on ultra-thin gate dielectrics etc.) arose for these conventional MOS NVMs. With the growth of nanotechnology and nanofabrication techniques, a very unique ability of significantly altering the material properties, through size reduction, has fallen into the hands of scientists and engineers. In the present scenario, the MOS memory sector too has not been left behind, in the race to apply nanotechnology for performance enhancement. A new type of MOS memory devices with nanocrystal (nc) embedded gate dielectric have come into prominence in recent years. In 2003 Motorola has introduced the first such memory device with memory density of about 4Mb/chip, followed by a 24Mb/chip memory developed by Freescale in 2006. In 2007 Samsung reported the research and development of Si nc based FinFET memory. As the VLSI industry has adopted new materials (like high-k dielectrics and compound semiconductor substrates) and structures (like DGMOSFET, FinFET, Surround-Gate FETs) for advanced MOS devices, the nc embedded MOSFETs have also evolved. Therefore, with new materials, new structures and extensive ongoing research, a lot is to be expected in recent years, from this exciting filed of MOS memory devices.