January 30, 2005

Barlage Receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Barlage (Photo: Andrea Haqq)

Dr. Douglas Barlage, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (Career) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), effective April 1, 2006. The Career award is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young university faculty in science and engineering.

As part of the award, NSF will provide $400,000 in funding over the next five years. Barlage will use the funding to support his research project, “Career: Low Dimension Column III-Nitride (III-N) Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) Structures for Terahertz and Gigascale Electronics.” The aim of the research is to demonstrate the potential of wideband-gap semiconductors as low power and massively scalable (>1billion transistors/chip) devices. His work is to demonstrate that these materials can be used to decrease the amount of off-state leakage while still demonstrating enough speed to be a useful product.

In conjunction with the research component of the project, Barlage has developed an education plan that works with 4-H chapters to bring the science of technology to middle school students. One of the components of this program is the RECs, robust electronic communication systems project that is being developed in conjunction with a senior design team. When this project is successful it will allow middle and high-school students to measure complex quantities, typically reserved for high-cost laboratories, and achieve this with an ordinary computer. This work will bring electrical engineering skills to students at a younger age and tap into their natural curiosity.

Barlage, who joined the College of Engineering in August 2002, was selected as one of the world’s 100 Top Young Innovators in 2002 by Technology Review, MIT’s magazine of innovation for his work as a researcher at Intel corporation.

He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Wright State University in 1992 and his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994 and 1997, respectively.

— weston —

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