MNTL Hilights report web Apr. 2016 | Page 26

OUR NEWEST FACULTY OUR RESEARCHERS ARE PART OF A HISTORIC SEMICONDUCTOR LEGACY THAT BEGAN WITH ENGINEERING GIANTS JOHN BARDEEN, NICK HOLONYAK JR., AND CHIH-TANG SAH, WHOSE GROUNDBREAKING WORK HELPED LAUNCH AND ADVANCE TODAY’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION. THEY AND THEIR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING COLLEAGUES FROM THE STORIED ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH LAB—THE PRECURSOR TO THE MICRO & NANOTECHNOLOGY LAB—SET A STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE THAT TODAY’S FACULTY STRIVE TO MEET. WE PROUDLY INTRODUCE THREE NEW FACULTY. WENJUAN ZHU is identifying the unique electronic and photonic properties of 2D materials and fabricating nanoscale devices. She and her students are taking advantage of the high carrier mobility of metallic 2D materials like graphene to build plasmonic devices and solar cells with transparent electrodes. For semiconducting 2D materials, such as MoS2 and WSe2, they are making sub-10nm transistors for computing. Zhu and her group are also combining 2D materials with traditional semiconducting materials and exploring their applications in computation, communications, energy, and medical areas. Before joining the Illinois faculty in August 2014, Zhu spent 11 years at IBM, where she made key contributions to 65 nm and 32 nm CMOS technology and explored the fundamental properties of 2D materials like graphene and layered transition metal dichalcogenides (LTMD) and made devices and circuits. CAN BAYRAM is developing efficient, high-power & compact ultra-violet AlGaInN LEDs to detect and eliminate biological agents like anthrax, plague, and ebola, and may be used to enable clean drinking water in underdeveloped areas. He and his students are also creating light sources that are tunable from UV to visible (200-750nm) wavelengths for general lighting, visualization, and biological applications. In the electronics area, he and his group are creating GaN-based transistors for next generation power transistors. Before joining the Illinois faculty in August 2014, Bayram spent three years at IBM, where he was part of the team that developed a record-breaking specific power solar cell, which was featured on the cover of Advanced Energy Materials in May 2013. Bayram also created a technique to grow GaN material that is compatible with conventional CMOS fabrication technology. AREND VAN DER ZANDE, who joined the Illinois faculty in August 2015, is investigating the properties of 2-dimensional (2D) materials and building novel devices from them. While his group has grown isolated layers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), their goal is to grow large-scale uniform MoS2 and other 2D materials. They’ve begun building a metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) system at MNTL that can produce uniform 2D materials on four-inch wafers. Van der Zande earned his doctorate in physics at Cornell University. He spent four years as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University, where he isolated and engineered the first graphene mechanical membrane. Because of its strength and flexibility, he and colleagues were able to build nanomechanical systems like electrostatically tunable drumhead resonators and impermeable gas membranes. 26