Suman Datta has received the Test of Time Award at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits. Datta is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Advanced Computing in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Datta, who holds a joint appointment with the School of Materials Science and Engineering, was honored this year along with his co-authors and former colleagues at Intel Corporation for his 2006 research, “Tri-Gate Transistor Architecture with High-k Gate Dielectrics, Metal Gates and Strain Engineering.” True to its name, the Test of Time Award recognizes papers that have established their significance in history by standing the test of time. The goal of the award is to honor impactful papers and promote their recognition in the Symposia’s community.

As transistor gets smaller, it gets harder to switch off the transistor effectively. In response, Datta and his former Intel colleagues formulated the Tri-Gate transistor technology that was first introduced commercially at the 22-nm technology node. The transistor architecture has scaled to the 5-nm node and remains the workhorse of all leading-edge logic technology.

The research was the first experimental demonstration of high-performance NMOS and PMOS Tri-gate transistors in which the channel strain, high-k gate dielectric, gate electrode work functions, epitaxial source-drain regions were co-optimized together with the fin dimensions (width and height) and the fin shape (trapezoidal versus rectangular). The paper illustrated how to combine the electrostatic benefit of the fully-depleted nonplanar transistor structure with high-permittivity gate dielectric, work-function engineered metal gate electrodes and high- strain-engineered high-mobility channel to demonstrate high-performance CMOS transistors.

In addition to receiving the Test of Time Award at the symposium, Datta organized a short course on Monolithic and Heterogenous Integration and Advances in Application-Specific Computing Systems and Technologies. His research group presented three papers at the symposium on A Thousand State Superlattice Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistor Analog Weight Cell (with Professor Shimeng Yu); BEOL Compatible Ferroelectric Routers for Run-time Reconfigurable Compute-in-Memory Accelerators (with Professor Shimeng Yu) and Multi-bit per-cell 1T SiGe Floating Body RAM for Cache Memory in Cryogenic Computing (with Professor Arijit Raychowdhury).

Now in it’s 42nd year, the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits is known as the microelectronics industry’s premiere international conference integrating technology, circuits, and systems. The 2022 symposium convened this year in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Zachary Engel has won the Best Student Oral Prize at the 2022 International Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy (ICMBE). Engel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is part of ECE’s Advanced Semiconductor Technology Facility (ASTF) directed by Professor Alan Doolittle.

ICMBE recognized Engel for the quality of his work and presentation excellence on "Demonstration of Sc0.2Al0.8N HEMT structures with a sheet resistance of 150 Ω/□ and a sheet charge of 5.9x1013 cm-2 with phase pure, metal rich growth.”

The research presents new semiconductor chemistries that allow for improved semiconductor quality as demonstrated by a record sheet charge and channel resistance in a next generation replacement for the current champion of power and RF transistors, AlGaN/GaN transistors. This new device will allow 2.5 times higher current than present technologies. In principle, it can be integrated with ASTF’s groundbreaking aluminum nitride-based semiconductor, which previous demonstrations have shown to be the largest voltage semiconductor ever created.

This year’s ICMBE was held in Sheffield, United Kingdom from September 4-9. The conference began in 1978 in Paris, France and provides a prominent international forum for reporting new developments in the areas of fundamental and applied molecular beam epitaxy research, including advances in the technique, synthesis of new materials, discovery of new physical properties, formation of novel heterostructures, and the development of innovative devices.

Some cancers have a long and deadly memory. Years or decades after the disease has been beaten into remission, cancer cells that weren’t killed by initial treatment may be lying dormant at metastatic sites, like the bone marrow, until they reawaken with malignant intent.

Gabe Kwong wants to build living sentinels to detect those dormant and potentially deadly disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) before the cancer can recur. It’s an ambitious and groundbreaking idea from a researcher whose lab has developed a reputation for innovative work, and it’s earned Kwong a 2022 Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“I’m extremely humbled, and grateful for what this means for the lab,” said Kwong, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This is a peer-reviewed honor, and it tells us that the field recognizes that our work over the past 10 years has been impactful and worth investing in.”

The Pioneer Awards support highly creative researchers with potentially transformative ideas. The largest grant in the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award will provide Kwong $5.5 million over the next five years. This is the first time a Georgia Tech or Emory research has received funding through the program. And it’s Kwong’s second high-risk project funded: He won the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for early career scientists in 2016.

According to the NIH, proposed pioneering work must be high-impact and “reflect ideas that are substantially different” from the researcher’s current program.  Kwong’s lab has been focused on engineering synthetic sensors until now. With this project, he’s shifting to reengineering living cells.

“For years, we’ve been designing ultra-sensitive sensors to detect cancer or the response to immunotherapy drugs. They function as sentinels and report on sites of disease by producing a signal that can be detected from a biofluid such as urine,” he said. “They’ve been inorganic probes that don’t have a memory or know how to think. Our goal is to develop a living sensor — immune cells that can traffic through the body and act as a long-lived pool of sentinels.”

Kwong is driven by the potential threat of cancer dormancy. Many cells leave the primary tumor and enter the body’s circulation. Called circulation tumor cells, or CTCs, they are typically short-lived and don’t lead to metastasis. Sometimes, however, a few of these cells may find their way to a distant organ and hide there, despite seemingly successful cancer treatment. These cells can wait for years, or even decades, before reawakening. So, patients with no evidence of disease could harbor dormant cancer and remain at risk of metastatic relapse for the rest of their lives.

“Currently, there is no good way to monitor these dormant cells or their reawakening,” Kwong said. “But we are living in an entirely new era of medicine and cancer immunotherapy where we can design T cells as living medicines. We see this as an opportunity to not only build a future where immune cells are engineered as therapies, but also as living sensors.”

The idea is to use the same T cells that are grafted into a patient as cancer-fighters as lifelong sensors that are continuously on the lookout for future disease. If Kwong and his team are successful, he said the technological breakthroughs could lead to new about how and when dormant cells reawaken.

“Once we figure out how to engineer these cells, we’ll likely transition to a phase where we’re talking more about earlier detection and preventative medicine,” he said. “Our new drugs are already working much, much better than before. Imagine if we can keep the cancer from coming back for years and years and intervene at the earliest stages of recurrence. That’s the high reward.”

For individuals suffering from hearing loss, good news may be on the horizon thanks to cutting-edge optical technology. The French National Research Agency (ANR) has awarded Abdallah Ougazzaden, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and president of Georgia Tech-Lorraine, a €560,000 ($560,700) grant to develop technology for a new class of cochlear implants that may be able to restore hearing for patients.

The project aims to create optically stimulated, reduced-size, high-density cochlear implants with removable LEDs (CORTIORGAN). Project collaborators include Jean-Paul Salvestrini, director of the Georgia Tech-CNRS IRL 2958 lab and adjunct lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Paul Voss, associate professor in ECE; and Suresh Sundaram, adjunct lecturer in ECE.

“CORTIORGAN is taking the technology for cochlear implants in a completely new direction through the optical stimulation of the cochlea with compact, dense, and highly flexible LED implants,” Ougazzaden said. “In particular, we will use a new semiconductor material – a two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride – that brings about a radical rethinking of existing methods for processing inorganic LED devices.”

The key technology is based on optogenetics, a groundbreaking biological technique that stimulates neurons and other cells with light. The technology has a range of medical and neuroscience applications, including sight recovery and blocking pain signals.

The researchers will use optogenetic methods to achieve optical stimulation of auditory nerves rather than traditional electrical stimulation. Because tissue inside the cochlea has high electrical conductivity, optical stimulation of nerves can result in better spatial resolution and thus better implants. 

CORTIORGAN’s goal is to develop removable ultra-thin LEDs that can be packaged in cochlear implants. The novel process allows the researchers to achieve size and flexibility requirements for cochlear implants that will be inserted into mouse cochlea and tested at the end of the project.

“This innovation will have a strong positive impact on the hearing-impaired by offering them an optical implant with greater spatial resolution and higher sound reproduction fidelity in comparison to existing electrical stimulation technology,” Ougazzaden added. “This optical technology will open the door for future neuroscience applications with many opportunities for commercialization.”

Other partners include Institut Pasteur, a renowned Paris-based center for biomedical research, and the Center for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (C2N), a collaboration between the University of Paris-Saclay and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

 

Writer: Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

Image: Georgia-Tech Lorraine