![]() “Being in industry then ended up having a long influence on me," Hu says. ![]() And in 1982, he spent a sabbatical in the heart of Silicon Valley, at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara. He started spending time down in Silicon Valley, not far from Berkeley, invited by companies to teach short courses on semiconductor devices. Government funding for energy research dried up, but a host of San Francisco Bay Area companies were supporting semiconductor research, and transitioning to corporate funding “was not very difficult," Hu says. “Electric cars," Hu explains, “needed high voltage, high current semiconductor devices."Ĭome the early 1980s, that move back to semiconductor research turned out to be a good thing. In 1976, he returned to Berkeley, this time as a professor, planning to do research in energy topics, including hybrid cars, an area that transported him back to semiconductors. So he switched his efforts toward developing low-cost solar cells for terrestrial applications-at the time, solar cells were used only on satellites. “I felt I had to do something," he said, “something that was useful, important that wasn't just writing papers." thesis on integrated optics, and went off to MIT to continue his work in that field.īut then came the 1973 oil embargo. He switched to researching optical circuits, did his Ph.D. His career soon took a detour because semiconductors, he recalls, just seemed too easy. In 1969, he landed at Berkeley, where he joined a research group working on metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistors. He decided that semiconductors would be the field for him and applied to graduate programs in the United States. That, in an era of bulky tube televisions, got Hu's attention. “It was 1968," Hu recalls, “and he told us semiconductors were going to be the material for future televisions, and the televisions would be like photographs we could hang on the wall." ![]() It was simply a challenge-the electrical engineering program required the highest test scores to get in.ĭuring his last year of college, Hu discovered the industry he would later shake up, thanks to Frank Fang, then a visiting professor from the United States. But instead of targeting a chemistry degree, he applied for the electrical engineering program at the National Taiwan University, even though he didn't really know what an EE actually did. As he approached the end of high school, he was still interested in science, mostly chemistry. ![]() It started in Taiwan, where Hu was a curious child, conducting stove-top experiments on seawater and dismantling-and reassembling-alarm clocks. The story of the FinFET didn't begin with Hu putting pencil to paper on an airline tray table, of course. One of those ideas, raising the channel through which current flows so that it sticks out above the surface of the chip, became the FinFET, a technology that earned Hu this year's IEEE Medal of Honor “for a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3-D device structures, that have helped keep Moore's Law going over many decades." He immediately thought of a solution-actually, two solutions-and, on a plane ride a few days later, sketched out those designs. government was worried-so worried that DARPA raised an alarm, launching a program seeking new chip technologies that could extend progress.Ĭhenming Hu, then a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, jumped at the challenge. The golden days would be coming to an end, the predictions went, when the size of a critical transistor feature, then around 350 nanometers, reached below 100 nm. Indeed, for the first time, murmurs throughout the semiconductor industry predicted the death of Moore's Law. Advances in chip technology continued apace with Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, generally because of the shrinking size of those transistors.īut the horizon no longer seemed limitless.
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