September 25, 2002

Barlage Selected as Top Young Innovator by Technology Review for His Nanoelectronics Research

Dr. Barlage

Dr. Douglas Barlage, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, was selected as one of the world’s 100 Top Young Innovators (TR100) by Technology Review, MIT’s magazine of innovation. Barlage and 99 other scientists and engineers under the age of 35 were honored at a May 22 awards ceremony on the MIT campus for their contributions in transforming the nature of technology in industries such as biotechnology, computing, energy, medicine, manufacturing, nanotechnology, telecommunications and transportation. Barlage won his award for his research in the field of nanoelectronics.

Barlage joined the College of Engineering faculty in August. Prior to joining NC State, he was a senior device engineer for five years with Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon. His work at Intel led to his receiving the TR100 honor. While at Intel, Barlage and team members developed a technique to accurately measure the properties of gate oxide, a fundamental component of a CMOS transistor. According to Barlage, the goal of the research was to make a thinner gate oxide in order to make a faster transistor.

Similar research was being conducted at NC State by Dr. John Hauser, professor and head of electrical and computer engineering, and Dr. Gerry Lucovsky, University Professor of Physics. According to Barlage, “The NC State team had developed one of the best oxides in the academic community and brought it to Intel for benchmarking.”

Barlage’s new measurement technique allowed Intel to create transistors as small as 10 nanometers (nm) (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). Current state-of-the-art production technology is 65 nm.

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

Barlage, who came to NC State because he considers it one of the top universities for research in semiconductor processing, believes that transistor research is at a crossroads Barlage said, “For the past 25 years, technology has produced a smaller and smaller version of essentially the same device. This scaling of the CMOS process has allowed the state-of-the-art computer to evolve from the Apple II operating at 1 MHz with 64 kByte of RAM to the Pentium IV operating at nearly 3 GHz with 2 Gbyte of RAM. This corresponds to a factor of three thousand improvement in speed and 30 thousand improvement in memory in a little over 20 years. Today, fundamental physical size and material limitations are slowing this traditional scaling. In some sense, the field is now wide open for new metal oxide semiconductor technologies and other alternative technologies for logic and RF applications — improvements require more than scaling of size. The existing capabilities of current technologies are allowing new innovative devices in unexplored territories such as bio-engineering. A 10 nm transistor is about the size of a strand of DNA.”

Barlage sees his research being focused in the areas of alternative and complimentary technologies and new uses of existing technology. He said, “It is exciting to look out into the future five to ten years and imagine the possibilities that are waiting to be uncovered.”

For more information about the 2002 TR100 awards, access this Web site: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/tr100_0602.asp.

— mcblief —

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