IIT student wins award for revolutionary research

[rahul_parab2006]

Mumbai: Prashanthi Kovur, a PhD student from the Centre for Excellence in Nanoelectronics, EE Department, IIT Bombay has been awarded the outstanding student researcher in the field of Physics, Chemistry of Material for nano-scale devices by the world largest semiconductor company TSMC.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is one of the world's largest semi conductor foundry, which provides leading technologies for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. The purpose of the TSMC Outstanding Student Research Award is to recognise exceptional semiconductor related research carried out by graduate students. The competition for this award attracted hundreds of applications from students from various universities all over the world.

Prashanthi's research is based on the development of a novel multiferroic system for MEMS applications. Magnetism and ferroelectricity are essential to many forms of current technology, and the quest for multiferroic materials, where these two phenomena are intimately coupled, is of great technological and fundamental importance.

It has been shown for the first time that room temperature multiferrocity with significant coupling could be achieved in Dy modified BiFeO3 system. The current work focuses on the fabrication of RF MEMS switch using this novel multiferroic based actuator.

This work was done under the guidance of Prof Vaijayanti R Palkar from EE Department, IIT Bombay. Prof Palkar who was invited as an honourable guest for the award ceremony delivered a lecture on 'Semiconductors in India and Functional Nano-oxides'.

Source : Sify