Muhannad Bakir has been named director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology’s 3D Systems Packaging Research Center (PRC).

"We’re thrilled to have Professor Bakir joining us as the new director,” said Michael Filler, IEN’s interim executive director. “His wealth of experience and pioneering work in advanced packaging make him an excellent fit to lead the PRC into an exciting new era of innovation and technological impact.”

Originating as a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in 1993, the PRC is a national leader in the advanced packaging of microelectronics. Advanced packaging in microelectronics refers to innovative techniques for merging and interconnecting multiple components within a single electronic entity. This enables more powerful, efficient, and versatile microelectronic systems, driving innovation across various industries. The Center conducts research and education in all aspects of electronics packaging, including design, materials, process, assembly, thermal management, and system integration. Its work is driven by a wide range of applications, such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, automotive systems, wireless communications, and space exploration.

“I am honored for the opportunity to lead the PRC and look forward to working with the campus community and our industry, government, and academic partners on a research agenda that tackles the multifaceted challenges in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration,” said Bakir.

As director, Bakir will guide the PRC into the future of advanced packaging through his vision and expertise. He is responsible for ensuring that the PRC's world-class facilities support the emerging needs of advanced packaging of microelectronics and supports members of the campus community who uses these facilities.

“We are excited to lead the science and engineering that culminates in system level prototyping and demonstrators for AI, mm-wave, photonic systems, and beyond,” he said.

Bakir, who also serves as the Dan Fielder Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leads the Integrated 3D Systems Group, brings a wealth of experience to his new role as PRC director. He and his research group have received more than 30 paper and presentation awards including seven from the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, four from the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference, and one from the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference. His group was also awarded the 2014 and 2017 Best Papers of the IEEE Transactions on Components Packaging and Manufacturing Technology.

Bakir is the recipient of the 2013 Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Award, 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2011 IEEE CPMT Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and was an Invited Participant in the 2012 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He is the co-recipient of the 2018 IEEE Electronics Packaging Society Exceptional Technical Achievement Award “for contributions to 2.5D and 3D IC heterogeneous integration, with a focus on interconnect technologies.” He is also the co-recipient of the 2018 McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards. In 2020, Bakir received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award.

He serves as a senior area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology and was previously an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. He has also served as a distinguished lecturer for IEEE EPS.

Learn more about PRC

Cicadas are the soundtrack of summer, but their pee is more special than their music. Rather than sprinkling droplets, they emit jets of urine from their small frames. For years, Georgia Tech researchers have wanted to understand the cicada’s unique urination.

Cicadas are the soundtrack of summer, but their pee is more special than their music. Rather than sprinkling droplets, they emit jets of urine from their small frames. For years, Georgia Tech researchers have wanted to understand the cicada’s unique urination.

Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and his research group hoped for an opportunity to study a cicada’s fluid excretion. However, while cicadas are easily heard, they hide in trees, making them hard to observe. As such, seeing a cicada pee is an event. Bhamla’s team had only watched the process on YouTube.

Then, while doing fieldwork in Peru, the team got lucky: They saw numerous cicadas in a tree, peeing.

Read more about what they discovered at Georgia Tech Research News.

The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) at Georgia Tech has announced the 2023 IEN Exponential Electronics (IEN-EX) Seed Grant winner, Vida Jamali, Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia tech.  

The primary purpose of this program is to give early-stage research and development to create revolutionary electronic systems.

IEN-EX provides seed funding for Georgia Tech researchers to pursue “1000x” ideas within electronics or that bridge electronics with other technical domains. “1000x” ideas are those with the potential to improve one or more well-defined, but often overlooked or underappreciated performance metrics by at least 1000x.

In this brief Q&A, Jamali discusses her research focus, how it relates to electronics research, and the impact of this initiative.

• What is your field of expertise and at what point in your life did you first become interested in this area? In situ liquid phase transmission electron microscopy. I started learning about this tool when I was a postdoc to develop it as a single particle tracking method. 
• Briefly explain your research: My research is focused on investigating the dynamics of nanoscale objects in their native liquid environment, from synthetic colloidal nanomachines to biological macromolecules, using liquid phase transmission electron microscopy. We develop experimental and computational tools to visualize and characterize dynamic behavior (equilibrium and non-equilibrium) at small length scales and in real-time.
• Who are the PIs: Me and Amirali Aghazadeh, Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
• What questions or challenges sparked your current research? Is it possible to use an electron microscope and capture the dynamics of nanoscale materials in time as they move and interact with each other and respond to their surrounding environment with a high spatiotemporal resolution?
• How is your research working to create revolutionary electronic systems? We design and develop a new nanoelectronic coded aperture device that once integrated into transmission electron microscopes can increase resolution exponentially.
• What are the broader global and social benefits of the research you and your team conduct? Once realized this technology opens a new window into dynamic phenomena at a scale inaccessible before. This unprecedented level of information will significantly advance areas from drug discovery impacting human health to achieving single crystalline materials for the semiconductor industry.
• How will this funding support your research? This funding will support graduate students who will be realizing this idea

The Oliver Brand Memorial Technical Symposium was held on Feb. 22 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in honor of the technical achievements of Professor Oliver Brand.

The event brought together students, faculty, and professionals in the microelectromechanical systems research community to celebrate Brand’s contributions to the field and explore cutting-edge research.

“As a fellow academic, looking at his contributions, they’re remarkable,” said Mike Filler, interim executive director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN). “But then what put it over the top was his humanity. He supported every member of the community; he believed in people and had their best interests in mind.”

The seven speakers included research colleagues, graduate students and technical staff who worked closely with Brand throughout his career. They reminisced about Brand and discussed the research and technical achievements they collaborated on with him.

Brand spent more than 20 years as a member of the Georgia Tech faculty. In addition to leading IEN, he was a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, director of the Coordinating Office for the NSF-funded National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), and director of the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, one of the 16 NNCI sites.

Brand united researchers in the fields of electronics and nanotechnology, fostering collaboration and expanding IEN to include more than 200 faculty members. In addition to his respected work in the field of microelectromechanical systems, he is remembered for his kindness, dedication, and unwavering support toward all who knew him.

Energy is everywhere, affecting everything, all the time. And it can be manipulated and converted into the kind of energy that we depend on as a civilization. But transforming this ambient energy (the result of gyrating atoms and molecules) into something we can plug into and use when we need it requires specific materials.

These energy materials — some natural, some manufactured, some a combination — facilitate the conversion or transmission of energy. They also play an essential role in how we store energy, how we reduce power consumption, and how we develop cleaner, efficient energy solutions.

“Advanced materials and clean energy technologies are tightly connected, and at Georgia Tech we’ve been making major investments in people and facilities in batteries, solar energy, and hydrogen, for several decades,” said Tim Lieuwen, the David S. Lewis Jr. Chair and professor of aerospace engineering, and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI).

That research synergy is the underpinning of Georgia Tech Energy Materials Day (March 27), a gathering of people from academia, government, and industry, co-hosted by SEI, the Institute for Materials (IMat), and the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center. This event aims to build on the momentum created by Georgia Tech Battery Day, held in March 2023, which drew more than 230 energy researchers and industry representatives.

“We thought it would be a good idea to expand on the Battery Day idea and showcase a wide range of research and expertise in other areas, such as solar energy and clean fuels, in addition to what we’re doing in batteries and energy storage,” said Matt McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and co-director, with Gleb Yushin, of the Advanced Battery Center.

Energy Materials Day will bring together experts from academia, government, and industry to discuss and accelerate research in three key areas: battery materials and technologies, photovoltaics and the grid, and materials for carbon-neutral fuel production, “all of which are crucial for driving the clean energy transition,” noted Eric Vogel, executive director of IMat and the Hightower Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

“Georgia Tech is leading the charge in research in these three areas,” he said. “And we’re excited to unite so many experts to spark the important discussions that will help us advance our nation’s path to net-zero emissions.”

Building an Energy Hub

Energy Materials Day is part of an ongoing, long-range effort to position Georgia Tech, and Georgia, as a go-to location for modern energy companies. So far, the message seems to be landing. Georgia has had more than $28 billion invested or announced in electric vehicle-related projects since 2020. And Georgia Tech was recently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the top public university for energy research.

Georgia has become a major player in solar energy, also, with the announcement last year of a $2.5 billion plant being developed by Korean solar company Hanwha Qcells, taking advantage of President Biden’s climate policies. Qcells’ global chief technology officer, Danielle Merfeld, a member of SEI’s External Advisory Board, will be the keynote speaker for Energy Materials Day.

“Growing these industry relationships, building trust through collaborations with industry — these have been strong motivations in our efforts to create a hub here in Atlanta,” said Yushin, professor in MSE and co-founder of Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery materials startup valued at more than $3 billion.

McDowell and Yushin are leading the battery initiative for Energy Materials Day and they’ll be among 12 experts making presentations on battery materials and technologies, including six from Georgia Tech and four from industry. In addition to the formal sessions and presentations, there will also be an opportunity for networking.

“I think Georgia Tech has a responsibility to help grow a manufacturing ecosystem,” McDowell said. “We have the research and educational experience and expertise that companies need, and we’re working to coordinate our efforts with industry.”

Marta Hatzell, associate professor of mechanical engineering and chemical and biomolecular engineering, is leading the carbon-neutral fuel production portion of the event, while Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, assistant professor in MSE, is leading the photovoltaics initiative.

They’ll be joined by a host of experts from Georgia Tech and institutes across the country, “some of the top thought leaders in their fields,” said Correa-Baena, whose lab has spent years optimizing a semiconductor material for solar energy conversion.

“Over the past decade, we have been working to achieve high efficiencies in solar panels based on a new, low-cost material called halide perovskites,” he said. His lab recently discovered how to prevent the chemical interactions that can degrade it. “It’s kind of a miracle material, and we want to increase its lifespan, make it more robust and commercially relevant.”

While Correa-Baena is working to revolutionize solar energy, Hatzell’s lab is designing materials to clean up the manufacturing of clean fuels.

“We’re interested in decarbonizing the industrial sector, through the production of carbon-neutral fuels,” said Hatzell, whose lab is designing new materials to make clean ammonia and hydrogen, both of which have the potential to play a major role in a carbon-free fuel system, without using fossil fuels as the feedstock. “We’re also working on a collaborative project focusing on assessing the economics of clean ammonia on a larger, global scale.”

The hope for Energy Materials Day is that other collaborations will be fostered as industry’s needs and the research enterprise collide in one place — Georgia Tech’s Exhibition Hall — over one day. The event is part of what Yushin called “the snowball effect.”

“You attract a new company to the region, and then another,” he said. “If we want to boost domestic production and supply chains, we must roll like a snowball gathering momentum. Education is a significant part of that effect. To build this new technology and new facilities for a new industry, you need trained, talented engineers. And we’ve got plenty of those. Georgia Tech can become the single point of contact, helping companies solve the technical challenges in a new age of clean energy.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology today announced the signing of a master research agreement with Micron Technology, a global leader in memory and storage solutions. Under the new agreement, the two organizations will expand their collaborative efforts in providing students with experiential research opportunities and expanding access to engineering education.

“We are proud to join forces with Georgia Tech, home to some of the nation’s top programs, to expand students’ opportunities in STEM education,” said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of Technology and Products at Micron. “This collaboration will help push the boundaries in memory technology innovation and ensure we prepare the workforce of the future.”

“We believe that when academia and industry converge, the best ideas flourish into game-changing innovations,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. “The synergy between Micron and Georgia Tech has already been tremendously fruitful, and we are so excited for the boundless opportunities on our shared horizon.”

“The signing of the master research agreement represents a significant step towards increasing additional collaboration pathways between Micron and GT including the joint pursuit of major federal funding activities, technology transfer, student internships and technology transfer,” said George White, senior director of Strategic Partnerships at Georgia Tech.

The first project under the agreement is already underway. Saibal Mukhopadhyay, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading the research efforts titled “Configurable Processing-In-Memory.” This cutting-edge research will enable memory devices to work faster and more efficiently.

Two College of Engineering professors are among the newest members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the organization announced Feb. 6.

Patricia Mokhtarian and David Sholl are part of a 2024 class that includes 114 new members and 21 international members. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional recognitions for engineers and an honor bestowed on just 2,600 professionals worldwide.

New members are nominated and voted on by the Academy’s existing membership. With Mokhtarian and Sholl, Georgia Tech now has 48 NAE members.

Get the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Pioneering a new recycling approach led to a big win for Re-Wind USA, a Georgia Tech research team led by Russell Gentry. The team has won the first phase of the Department of Energy's Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize, receiving $75,000 and an invitation to compete in the final phase.

"Our innovation for end-of-service wind turbine blades is both simple and elegant – at its core, our technology captures all the embodied energy in the composite materials in the blade," said Gentry, professor in the School of Architecture.

"The Re-Wind Network has pioneered structural recycling, the only of a number of competing technologies that upcycles the material of the blade and preserves the embodied energy from manufacturing," Gentry said.

"Little additional energy is used to remanufacture the blade and the life of the blade, typically 20 years, is extended at least 50 years. This is a win-win solution from an environmental and economic perspective."

Other methods for dealing with decommissioned wind blades involve mechanical grinding and landfilling of subsequent waste, an expensive and energy-intensive process, he said.

Team members include Gentry, Sakshi Kakkad, Cayleigh Nicholson, Mehmet Bermek, and Larry Bank, from the School of Architecture; Gabriel Ackall, Yulizza Henao, and Aeva Silverman, from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering;  and Eric Johansen, a business consultant from Fiberglass Trusses Inc.

The team is part of the Re-Wind Network, a multinational research and development network which develops large-scale infrastructure projects from decommissioned wind turbine blades. 

Re-Wind's pedestrian bridges, known as BladeBridges, have already captured media attention. Two more BladeBridges are expected in Atlanta in 2024, Gentry said. Re-Wind has also developed, prototyped, and tested transmission poles made from blade segments. The team's other proposals include culverts, barriers, and floats.

Associate Professor Marta Hatzell has won a 2024 ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award, which recognizes leading contributions of scientists and engineers active in the general fields of green chemistry, green engineering, and sustainability in the broadest sense of the chemical enterprise.

Hatzell, who holds joint appointments in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was honored for her multiple contributions that drive the application of electrochemistry to enable critical systems with enhanced circularity.

The ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship awards were created to celebrate early to midcareer investigators who completed academic training no more than 10 years prior to nomination. In support of their commitment to nurture and stimulate a global community of outstanding practice. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering and the ACS Green Chemistry Institute gave three Lectureship Awards to recognize outstanding levels of contribution from The Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia/Pacific.

The award recipients will be honored at a joint plenary session of the 28th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in their honor (June 3–5, 2024; https://www.gcande.org/).

Semiconductors, or microchips, are vital to life in the modern world. They’re used in the microwave you heated your breakfast in this morning, the car you drove to work, the mobile phone you shouldn’t use while driving, the bank ATM you visited, and the screened device you’re reading this story on.

They’re in our TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines, helping us live comfortable lives. They also help us stay alive as part of the medical network, used in pacemakers, blood pressure monitors, and MRI machines, among other things. Also, our national economic and defense systems rely on them. Basically, semiconductors control and manage the flow of information in the machinery that keeps the world going.

And right now, at Georgia Tech, researchers are working to innovate chip technology to ensure that U.S. semiconductor development is globally competitive, reliable, sustainable, and resilient, today and in the future.

“If you look at semiconductors, or the whole area of computing, it spans across Georgia Tech — across many different schools and disciplines,” said Arijit Raychudhury, professor and Steve W. Chaddick Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “Starting with physics and chemistry, where we essentially learn how different types of materials will react, to materials science and engineering, to electrical engineering and computer engineering, to computer science.”

It's a diverse, multidisciplinary enterprise from bottom to top, Raychudhury noted. And there is still plenty of room at the bottom, as theoretical physicist Richard P. Feynman famously said more than 60 years ago, predicting that one day we’d be making things at the atomic level. We are. It’s a familiar realm to Victor Fung and his lab, where they are designing new materials for semiconductors from the ground up, atom by atom.

“We are interested in exploring how to translate the latest advances in AI and machine learning to aid in accelerating computational materials simulations and materials discovery,” said Fung, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science. “We’ve been developing methods which can accurately predict a wide range of materials’ properties, to greatly facilitate high-throughput materials screening.”

Fung’s lab is using AI to discover previously unstudied materials with the electronic properties to build into chips. This approach to creating “designer” semiconductors would be significantly faster and cover more of the materials space than current methods.

Improving the Landscape

Smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are all part of the constantly evolving landscape in semiconductor research and development. It’s a very expensive landscape. While many chips are about the size of a fingernail, they are among the most complex human-made objects on Earth. Just building a semiconductor fabrication factory costs billions of dollars.

For a chemical engineer like Michael Filler, that sounds like opportunity.

“Chemical engineers think about how we produce products on a massive scale,” said Filler, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and associate director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN).

Filler, whose research involves the growing of semiconductor components, like transistors, from seed particles, is aiming to help democratize the process of chip development, bringing down the cost substantially while maintaining performance. In a not too distant future, that could mean an individual at home printing a chip on a machine similar to a 3D printer.

“Imagine a laser printer that can literally spit out custom electronics in a matter of minutes,” Filler said. “We’re big believers in the individual’s ability to be creative and know what they want to build for their applications. Ultimately, we’re interested in giving makers and prototypers opportunities to customize electronics.”

He’s in the right place for the far-reaching research he has in mind, adding, “We are so blessed with great facilities at Georgia Tech. It would be hard to imagine working somewhere else, because very few places have the diversity and quality of tooling we have here.”

IEN, which facilitates much of the semiconductor research at Georgia Tech, is based in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, with its state-of-the-art micro/nano fabrication facilities such as the shared cleanroom space and a laser machine lab for micromachining.

But it is the range of expertise and creativity among faculty and students who are making IEN and Georgia Tech a thought leader in semiconductor research. This is evidenced by Tech’s recent grant of $65.7 million from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Research Projects Agency to launch two new interdisciplinary research centers.

Events like Georgia Tech Chip Day (May 2) and Nanowire Week, an international gathering happening in Atlanta in October, also speak to Tech’s growing influence in this area.

Answering the Call

The Covid-19 pandemic clarified just how difficult it can be to make more chips. A shortage of semiconductors affected the supply of phones, computers, and other commonly used items during the global shutdown. Increased demand, depleted reserves, and too few manufacturing plants and workers significantly crippled the supply chain.

“The high degree of geographic concentration in certain parts of the semiconductor supply chain has recently created a heightened risk of supply interruptions,” said Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). “Such interruptions and resulting wild fluctuations in semiconductor demand can threaten the nation’s public health, defense, and economic security.”

With that in mind, translational supply chain research is going on in several places on campus, White said, including the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and the NSF AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization. White and his colleagues are developing software platforms for stress testing manufacturing supply chains. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities and risk mitigation procedures to design and operate next generation supply chains for critical industries such as the semiconductor industry, to improve global competitiveness and strike a balance between market forces and national security.

In an effort to address and feed the next generation demand for chips, the Biden administration recently launched a massive effort to outcompete China in semiconductor manufacturing, offering $39 billion in funding incentives for companies seeking to build plants in the U.S.

Another related area of importance in the ongoing development of semiconductors is growing the workforce of the future, and that includes a new wave of researchers. This is a role that Jennifer Hasler takes seriously.

“I have a strong interest and belief in mentoring,” said Hasler, ECE professor and founder of the Integrated Computational Electronics lab at Georgia Tech. She’s proven, theoretically at least, that the technology already exists to build a silicon-based version of the human cerebral cortex (which would cost billions of dollars to design and build), but one of her favorite roles is working with new, young faculty.

“It’s a personal thing for me, but it’s one of the coolest things I’m involved in,” she said. “When they come to Georgia Tech, they see how big this place is, bigger than a company. I like to say to them, ‘Let’s calm down, take a breath, you’re good, so let’s go make some cool stuff. Let’s get some momentum going.’”

For Raychowdhury, director of the new Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (part of the JUMP 2.0 program), developing the skilled workforce of the future means answering the call of the nation.

“This is one of the largest ECE departments in the country, with many, many talented students,” he said. “And given the need and shortage of skilled professionals in this particular area, I think it’s critical for us to create that kind of pipeline.” Last year, ECE undergraduate students started taking a new, two-semester course, sponsored by Apple, in which they actually build microprocessors from scratch.

“This is completely new,” Raychowdhury said. “It’s expensive to offer this course, but we plan to keep doing it and we’re in conversations with other companies that want to invest in workforce development. So, in addition to doing fantastic research, we want to be sensitive to the needs of the country and a new generation.”