SEMI, San Jose, Calif., announces the recipients of the 2015 SEMI Awards for innovations that have become such an integral part of the semiconductor manufacturing industry’s infrastructure that the technology itself has become fundamental. The awards for the Americas honor (left to right in photo) Chenming Hu (for the BSIM families of compact transistor models); Alex Lidow for commercialization of GaN power devices; and an Intel team representred by Robert S. Chau for implementation of bulk CMOS FinFET production. The awards were presented at the 2016 SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) in Half Moon Bay, Calif.
2015 award recipients all share the distinction of having pioneered processes and integration breakthroughs that became ubiquitous.
For developing the Berkeley Short-channel Insulated-gate FET Model (BSIM) families of compact transistor models, enabling worldwide adoption of advanced device technologies, Professor Chenming Hu was presented with the 2015 Americas SEMI award. Analog circuit simulators, such as Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE), form the foundation for circuit simulators used in integrated circuit design, and compact transistor models are the heart of simulators. BSIM3 and its successors, developed in the BSIM group at University of California Berkeley under the leadership of Professor Hu, are the industry standard for transistor modeling. For the past 20+ years, all commercial circuit simulators have included BSIM models.
The Americas SEMI award was presented to Dr. Alex Lidow, Ph.D., for innovation in power device technology enabling commercialization of GaN devices with performance and cost advantages over silicon. Silicon-based devices were reaching their limits in speed and efficiency, prompting Lidow to develop Gallium Nitride (GaN) technologies, but high cost limited its commercial success. Lidow led the GaN development activity at International Rectifier and continued that work at Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC), a company he co-founded in 2007. EPC introduced the first commercial enhancement mode GaN power transistors in 2009. Challenges from resolving packaging limitations to establishing a low-cost supply chain were overcome through persistence, paving the way for the successful commercialization of GaN power devices.
An Intel development team ─ Christopher P. Auth, Robert S. Chau, Brian S. Doyle, Tahir Ghani and Kaizad R. Mistry ─ were honored with SEMI Awards for the first development, integration and introduction of a successful bulk FinFET technology for CMOS IC production, first implemented at the 22nm node in 2011. The successful introduction of a bulk FinFET process in commercial IC logic and I/O devices, aided by support from SEMI member companies with development of advanced materials, processes and production tools, was a critically important milestone, which led to the widespread adoption of bulk FinFETs as the technology of choice of leading-edge, fully-depleted CMOS logic devices.
