Ava Tan wins DRC 2020 Best Paper Award

EECS graduate student Ava Jiang Tan (advisor: Sayeef Salahuddin) has won the 2020 Best Paper Award at the 78th Device Research Conference (DRC) for “Reliability of Ferroelectric HfO2-based Memories: From MOS Capacitor to FeFET.”  The paper, co-authored by Profs. Salahuddin and Chenming Hu, grad student Yu-Hung Liao, postdoc Jong-Ho Bae, and Li-Chen Wang of MSE, introduces nonvolatile ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) which boast impressive programmability and a strong potential for further scalability.  The paper also demonstrates for the first time a systematic, reliable, and rapid method to qualitatively predict the FE endurance of prospective gate stack designs prior to running a full FeFET fabrication process.  Tan works in the Laboratory for Emerging and Exploratory Devices (LEED), and is particularly interested in the architectural potential of nonvolatile ferroelectric CMOS-compatible memories for realizing brain-inspired computing paradigms and energy-efficient hardware for deep learning. The DRC, which is the longest-running device research meeting in the world,  was held in June.