UCSD EDS & LEOS Chapters Host Distinguished Lecture

Fluorine Plasma Ion Implantation (Treatment) Technology: a New Dimension in GaN Device Processing

Professor Kevin J. Chen - Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Abstract:
Wide-bandgap gallium nitride (GaN) and related compound semiconductor materials possess attractive characteristics including high breakdown voltage, high polarization-induced carrier density and high electron saturation velocity. Rapid progress has been made in material growth and device processing technologies during the last decade. Meanwhile, there remain technical challenges to overcome. For example, unlike the silicon MOSFET technology, in which the devices' threshold voltage can be locally adjusted in the processing stage by ion implantation, the threshold voltage of AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) is mainly determined in the material growth stage and exhibit negative values. Recently, a robust approach to modulating the local potential and carrier concentration in AlGaN/GaN HEMTs was developed based on a post-epitaxy fluorine plasma ion implantation (or treatment) technology. The most significant development based on this technology is the demonstration of self-aligned enhancement-mode AlGaN/GaN HEMTs with low on-resistance.

In this talk, Dr. Chen will give a comprehensive overview of the fluorine plasma ion implantation technology. Underlying physical mechanisms will be discussed, together with detailed dc and RF device characteristics. Examples of extending this technology to improve the performance of power transistors as well as power rectifiers will be shown. The reliability issues related to the fluorine plasma ion implantation will be discussed based on results from stress test and molecular dynamics simulation.

Tried scitopia.org yet?

One of my favorite tech search sites is scitopia.org. Full disclosure: IEEE is a major partner in this, along with 20 (for now) other society publishers. I'm quite proud of this initiative -- as a librarian, I applaud any effort to help users "cut to the chase" so to speak. With scitopia.org I don't waste time assessing what's credible -- or not -- in a freely accessible site.

I've added a scitopia.org search box to my blog (scroll down -- it's on the lower left) -- you can, too.

WIE Rocks!

Our very own Dr. Karen Panetta (IEEE Fellow, Worldwide Director of IEEE Women in Engineering) has garnered a lot of attention for her work dispelling the myth of the "Nerd Girl" in engineering. Newsweek recently covered Karen's initiative - Geek Girls: Revenge of the Nerdette and last Friday Karen and several of her students appeared on the Today Show

Learn more about IEEE Women in Engineering and check out its new magazine (you can see the premiere issue here), winner of a 2008 Apex Award of Excellence!

Head Start on Celebrating Pi Day (March 14)

Need a clever way to break up the monotony of a long, cold month? Read about Stanford's and Worcester Polytech's Pi parties in the Institute: Student Branches Celebrate Pi Day

Pi (pie) - a - Prof has always been one of my favorites....

Dartmouth Formula Hybrid in IEEE's Institute

Check out the article in the July issue of IEEE's Institute on Dartmouth's Formula Hybrid competition!

McGill Wins Hybrid Race Car Competition

Drexel Hosts Engineering Comedian Don McMillan

The Drexel IEEE Student Branch co-sponsored "Technically Funny" on May 29, featuring engineering comedian Don McMillan.

"Before he became a nationally known stand-up comedian, McMillan spent 10 years as an engineer at IBM, AT&T and VLSI Technology. His show is funny, smart and clean, and he just might be the only comedian who works in PowerPoint!"

Cloud Computing at Stanford

Call For Participation!
*** Cloud Computing--- the New Face of Computing---Promise and Challenges ***
Date: July 19 (Saturday)
Place: Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University
Organizers:
~Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society: (http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/computer/)
~Stanford Student Chapter of the IEEE
~North America Taiwanese Engineers' Association (NATEA): (http://www.natea.org/sv/conferences/nfic/2008/nfic_2008.php)

Registration: http://www.natea.org/sv/conferences/nfic/2008/nfic_2008_reg.php

$65 Non-IEEE Member;
$60 IEEE Member;
$30 Students or Unemployed

*** The list of Talks ***
Hamid Pirahesh, IBM Almaden Research - Keynote

Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland at College Park
"Scalable Text Processing with MapReduce"

Jim Rivera, Salesforce.com
"Platform as a Service: Changing the Economics of Innovation"

Joydeep Sen Sarma and Ashish Thusoo, Facebook
"Hive: Datawarehousing and Analytics on Hadoop"

Hairong Kuang, Yahoo
"Take an internal look at Hadoop"

Mano Marks, Google
Kevin Beyer, IBM Almaden Research
"Jaql: Querying JSON data on Hadoop"

Mihai Budiu, Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley
"DryadLINQ -- a language for data-parallel computation on computer clusters"

Jinesh Varia, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
"Cloud Architectures -- New way to design architectures by building it in the cloud"