Event
MSE Seminar: Dr. Asir Intisar Khan, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
3:30 p.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Sherri Tatum
301-405-5240
statum12@umd.edu
Transformative Materials for Energy-Efficient Electronics
Abstract: As pervasive data expands, energy-efficiency in electronics is crucial to meet global demands in energy, sustainability, personal health, IoT, and beyond. However, with traditional materials and architectures today's electronics are approaching their energy and latency limits. This necessitates exploring new electronic materials, and their nanoscale unconventional functionalities for low-power electronics.
In this seminar, I will present several examples of atomic-scale materials engineering that advance low-power memory, logic, and interconnects. First, I will discuss how electro-thermal and interface engineering in chalcogenide heterostructures, and nanocomposites enable low-power and brain-inspired memory for both rigid and flexible electronics, unlike existing data-storage technology. These efforts have led to the ultralow current- and sub-1 V voltage-switching in phase-change memory, essential for 3D monolithic integration. Next, I will introduce an exceptional resistivity scaling in non-crystalline topological semimetals which exhibit smaller resistivity in thinner films due to surface-dominated transport (unlike traditional metals), offering a new paradigm in low-resistivity interconnects. Finally, I will demonstrate the versatility of these semimetals in spin-based memory and as novel p-type electrical contacts to 2D semiconductors. The realization of these materials at relatively low temperatures makes them compatible with modern microelectronics. These results highlight the transformative potential of new materials for vertically integrated, energy-efficient electronics.
Bio: Asir Khan is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin (U.C. Berkeley) and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford (2023) supervised by Prof. Eric Pop. Asir’s research focuses on nanoscale engineering of materials to uncover new functionalities and understand their transport properties for energy-efficient electronics. He has interned at TSMC and IBM facilitating the technology transfer of his work on phase-change memory. His work has been recognized with the MRS Gold Graduate Award, IEEE-EDS PhD Fellowship, AVS Russell & Sigurd Varian Award, and the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, along with several best paper and presentation awards at MRS Fall Meeting (2022), IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits (2022), SRC TECHCON (2023), and the Electronic Materials & Photonics Division, AVS (2023).
