BANGALORE: To encourage innovation in semiconductor research, Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA), in association with the VLSI Society of India (VSI) gave away the Technovation Awards at a glittering ceremony on July 31 here.
The Technovation Awards, conceptualized to recognize and promote excellence in the field of semiconductor research and innovation, also offers incentives to fresh talent to excel.
Dr. R.Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India & DEA, presented the awards recognizing the contribution of these researchers in the semiconductor space.
For the year 2007-'08, the awards were in four categories.
TechnoVisionary from Stanford
Prof. Krishna Saraswat, Stanford University, USA was awarded the ISA TechnoVisionary Award, a lifetime achievement award. The award is a lifetime achievement award given to a global Indian or Person of Indian Origin for outstanding contributions in the field of semiconductors.
Prof Saraswat was bestowed the TechnoVisionary Award to recognize his contribution in
· Si/Ge technology for nanoscale MOSFET transistors and optical interconnects.
· Three-dimensional ICs technology with multiple layers of heterogeneous devices
· Single wafer manufacturing for a microfactory
· Thin film technology for VLSI interconnections and contacts
· Development of several simulators for process, equipment, and factory performance simulations.
Many semiconductor companies have been associated with Prof. Saraswat's research work. These include Toshiba, NEC, Intel, Samsung, TEL. Sony, Renesas Technology, and Hitachi. Asahi-Kasei Microsystems, Matsushita Electronics Corp.
In his acceptance speech, Prof. Saraswat said that the award from ISA meant a lot to him as it came from India. "I have received many awards in my career, but this has to be the sweetest one," said the beaming Professor.
Prof. Saraswat has been awarded the 'Thomas D. Callinan Award,' by The Electrochemical Society for his contribution to dielectric science and technology in May 2000. IEEE also awarded him 'Andrew Grove Award' for seminal contributions to silicon process technology in 2004.
Prof Krishna Saraswat holds PhD and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and had passed out of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, (BITS) Pilani in 1968.
IIT-D professor is TechnoMentor
Prof. Jagdish Kumar, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi was awarded the ISA-VSI TechnoMentor Award. The award is given to an academic professional working in India for being an academic of extraordinary mentoring and research abilities.
The TechMentor award was bestowed on Prof. Kumar to recognize and value his contribution in academia and his role in mentoring some of the best brains in the semiconductor industry.
Expressing sense of fulfillment on receiving the award, Prof. Kumar thanked his students for helping him get the award. He said, "The inquisitive questions my students poised, coupled with their dedication, pushed me to pursue new vistas." Prof. Kumar thanked ISA for selecting him for the award and added that such awards would inspire generation of teachers to do much more pioneering and mentoring work in the semiconductor arena.
Many of Prof. Kumar's students are working in leading semiconductor companies and are doing cutting edge research in leading research institutes across the world. Prof. Kumar is one among the few Indians who has the maximum number of IEEE papers to his credit in the last 10 years.
Among his several achievements, the professor has worked extensively on improving the performance nanoscale semiconductor devices and power monitoring. Speaking exclusively on the Indian semiconductor context, he added: "India has lot of potential in building devices, which are not in nanoscale. Highly expensive fab facilities may not be required." He cited organic semiconductor as a key area where lot of work was being done.
Prof. Kumar holds PhD and MS in electrical engineering from the University of Madras and MSc in applied sciences from Osmania University, Hyderabad. He also holds postdoctoral fellow from University of Waterloo, Canada.
TechnoInventors supreme
Dr. R.K. Sharma, from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra and Syam Sundar Reddy E., from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-M), Madras, were given ISA-VSI TechnoInventor Award. The ISA-VSI TechnoInventor of the year award is given to young investigators recognizing outstanding Doctorate or Masters research from Indian universities.
Dr. Sharma was bestowed the TechnoInventor award for his outstanding work. His thesis, titled Sonic Radiation Transit time-based Measurement System, focused on, for the first time, the speed of sound is gasoline and diesel, which was determined experimentally. It was also established that the speed of sound in gasoline and diesel samples could also be used to detect adulteration. This may find an application in the petroleum industry.
The speed of sound in dry and wet agricultural soil was also determined experimentally. It was established that the soil's water content could be estimated by measuring the speed of sound. A design of the system has been proposed for automatic irrigation control of crops, leading to considerable saving of underground water and avoiding its contamination due to over irrigation.
Syam Sundar Reddy was given the award for his outstanding work on Novel CLB Architectures and Techniques to Mitigate SEU Faults in SRAM-based FPGAs. As designers are aware, FPGAs are extensively used in modern digital design, mainly to exploit their reconfigurable feature. This also provides safety-critical features.
As FPGAs are used in safety-critical systems, there is a need to provide a higher degree of fault-tolerance. Hence, a single-event upset (SEU) can lead to errors in logic or routing. Logic errors can also lead to complementing entries in look-up tables (LUT), in the process modifying functionality of the mapped function. Even a routing error can lead to signals getting misrouted or disconnected. Syam Sundar Reddy's work proposed a novel FPGA based architecture for detecting and correcting SEU enabled logic and routing errors. Not surprisingly, Reddy is working at Xilinx, a programmable logic company and a leader in FPGAs.
IITs share TechnoShield
Two of the most prestigious institutions, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, were the joint recipients of the ISA-VSI TechnoShield Award.
The award is a rolling shield for the best academic institution in India for its remarkable work in the semiconductor space.
Both of the institutes have full-fledged departments pursuing research in semiconductor domain and have submitted in-depth research reports in semiconductor. Prof. Amitava Dasgupta from IIT-Madras and Prof. Debasish Dutta from IIT-Kharagpur shared the award. Prof. Dasgupta called for setting up a joint research lab and multiple other such labs in the country, along with the MNCs.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr. R. Chidambaram said that the awards would act as a catalyst among the academia and the industry for conducting even much more pioneering work in the semiconductor industry. "These awards will go a long way to recognize the talent and hard work that the scientists and the leading institutions have been putting in year after year in the field of semiconductors," he noted. He expressed happiness at the nomination of Prof. Saraswat as the TechnoVisionary, and his receiving the award.
Earlier, Ms. Poornima Shenoy, president, ISA, said: "The semiconductor driven industry relies on university research to take it further. India should be an active participant in this process and industry appreciates and understands this fact.
"In today's knowledge intensive world, a nation's strength lies in its capability to innovate in core technological areas. In the immediate past and in the years to come, semiconductor technology will continue to be a core technology that contributes immensely to a nation's economic strength. Therefore, it is imperative for us to have a sustained effort and strategy to promote and propagate semiconductor research in our R&D institutions."
S. Janakiraman, president, ISA, and president and CEO R&D Services, Mindtree, touched upon the growing might of the Indian semiconductor industry, and the joint role that the academia and the industry have to play. He added that the ISA was committed to building and strengthening a semiconductor ecosystem in India. V. Veerappan, co-founder and vice president, Tessolve, proposed the vote of thanks.
ISA received a good quality of applications for these awards from the premier and next line institutions and their faculty members. The jury for Technovation Awards, 2007 included eminent personalities from industry and academia across the globe. The recipients of the Awards were selected after a rigorous process of evaluation. The Awards include trophy/shield and monetary reward.
