| RELATED INFO |
| * Purdue University Electrical and Computer Engineering Home Page |
| * Mark S. Lundstrom |
February 3, 2009
Industry leader to give talk on 21st century technology
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - |
Hillenius, who leads an international consortium of electronics companies that fund university research, will deliver the Philip Bagwell Memorial Lecture and will focus on future challenges in the semiconductor industry.
He will speak about the importance of basic university research in discovering breakthrough materials, structures and designs to enable the development of new technologies and applications. The lecture also will touch on these possible future technologies and the role of nanoscience, or the creation of entirely new materials and devices by manipulating and assembling components no larger than a few atoms or molecules.
New technologies will be needed for energy production, medicine and health-care applications and for industry to keep pace with Moore's law, an unofficial rule stating that the number of transistors on integrated circuits, or chips, doubles about every 18 months. This doubling leads to advances in computers and electronics. It is becoming increasingly difficult, however, to continue shrinking electronic devices made of conventional silicon-based semiconductors, meaning new technologies will be needed in the future, said lecture organizer Mark S. Lundstrom, Purdue's Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
"Dr. Hillenius has extremely valuable insights into key research challenges confronting the semiconductor industry," Lundstrom said. "He has a unique perspective into where the electronics industry will be going in the 21st century.”
The talk, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Philip F. Bagwell Lecture Series organized and sponsored by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Hillenius has published more than 70 articles on semiconductor devices and processing. In 1996 he was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "for contributions to the field of solid-state technology and its applications to integrated circuits."
He is executive vice president of the Semiconductor Research Corp., a nonprofit research consortium for the electronic-chip industry, and he is executive director of the Global Research Collaboration, a subsidiary of the SRC. He was previously director of the integrated circuit device technology department at Agere Systems Inc., where he worked from 2001 until 2006. He was a researcher and research manager at Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 2001 and was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Virginia from 1978 to 1981.
Two of his patents were chosen for the 2005 Agere Innovation Award, given to the Agere Systems inventor of the most commercially significant patent, and the AT&T Patent Recognition Award in 1992, presented for that year's most commercially significant patent. Hillenius also has been involved with the planning and "road mapping" of the semiconductor industry for the past decade.
The first Bagwell Lecture was held in 2004 in honor of Philip Bagwell, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who died in 2002.Writer: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, venered@purdue.edu
Source: Mark S. Lundstrom, (765) 494-3515, lundstro@ecn.purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
To the News Service home page