Subramanian S. Iyer

Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor

Electrical Engineering Department, UCLA

Subramanian S. Iyer (Subu) is Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor in the electrical Engineering Department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He obtained his B.Tech. from IIT-Bombay, and Ph.D. from UCLA and joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown heights, NY and later moved to the IBM systems and Technology Group at Hopewell Junction, NY where he was appointed IBM Fellow and was till recently Director of the Systems Scaling Technology Department. His key technical contributions have been the development of the world’s first SiGe base HBT, Salicide, electrical Fuses, embedded DRAM and 45nm technology used at IBM and IBM’s development partners. He also was among the first to commercialize bonded SOI for CMOS applications through a start-up called SiBond LLC. He has published over 250 papers and holds over 70 patents. His current technical interests and work lie in the area of advanced packaging and three-dimensional integration for system-level scaling, as well as the long-term semiconductor and packaging roadmap for logic, memory and other devices as well as hardware and supply-chain integrity. He has received several outstanding technical achievements and corporate awards at IBM. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE EDS as well as its treasurer. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Bombay and received the IEEE Daniel Noble Medal for emerging technologies in 2012. He also studies Sanskrit in his spare time.

Abstract: The progress society has made from the Stone Age to the “Silicon Age” has had strong underpinnings in Material’s Science and Engineering. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the development of Silicon Technology over the last five decades where we can perhaps claim that no material system has been studied more prolifically and avidly than silicon. An electrical engineer with little formal training in materials quickly learns on the job. In this talk, I will detail specific examples of how materials have played a key role in the development of many of the technologies that I have been associated in my own career in this Industry. Areas we will cover in this talk will include the role of electromigration, silicon based heterostructures, silicon wafer technology, Hi k dielectrics and their impact on the course of technology development. We will see how a basic understanding of materials can lead to faster development cycles, more economical as well as more reliable products coupled with a good deal of intellectual satisfaction for an electrical engineer and his materials colleagues. Finally, I will stress how important sound materials science and engineering will be as we develop ideas proposed for CHIPS (chips.ucla.edu)