Editor-in-Chief and Editors

Gianluca Boselli completed his Master in EE at the University of Parma, Italy, in 1996. In 2001 he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, where he worked on high current phenomena in CMOS components. In 2001 he joined Texas Instruments, Dallas, Texas, where he focused on ESD and Latch-up development for advanced CMOS technologies, with particular emphasis on process and modeling aspects. In 2007 his responsibilities extended into ESD development of Texas Instruments’ Analog technologies portfolio. He authored several papers in the area of ESD and Latch-up. He presented his work at major conferences, including EOS/ESD Symposium, IEDM, and IRPS. He also presented many invited tutorials and papers at various conferences, including EOS/ESD Symposium, IRPS, IEDM, ESREF, IEW and RCJ. Dr. Boselli has been the recipient of the “Best Paper Award” on behalf of Microelectronics Reliability Journal in 2000. He received “The Best Paper Award” at the EOS/ESD Symposium 2002. He also received the “Outstanding Symposium Award” at the EOS/ESD Symposium in 2002, 2006 and 2010. Dr. Boselli served multiple times as Sub-Committee Chair for Technical Program Committees (TPC) of EOS/ESD Symposium, IRPS, IEW and ESREF. He served as moderator and panelist in many workshops in ESD and Latch-up area. Dr. Boselli has served as TPC Chair at the EOS/ESD Symposium 2006, Vice-General Chair at the EOS/ESD Symposium 2007 and General Chair at the EOS/ESD Symposium 2008. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the ESD Association, where he is the Symposium Business Unit Manager. Dr. Boselli is an IEEE senior member and holds fourteen patents with several pending.

Felice Crupi received the M.S. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Messina, Messina, Italy, in 1997 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Firenze, Firenze, Italy, in 2001. Since 2002, he has been with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Università della Calabria, Rende, Italy, as an Associate Professor of electronics. Since 1998, he has been a repeat Visiting Scientist with the Interuniversity Micro-Electronics Center (IMEC), Leuven, Belgium. In 2000, he was a Visiting Scientist with the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His main research interests include reliability of CMOS devices, modeling and simulation of CMOS devices, electrical characterization techniques for solid state electronic devices, the design of ultra‑low noise electronic instrumentation and the design of extremely low power CMOS circuits. He has authored and coauthored more than 80 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and more than 50 papers published in international conference proceedings. He serves or served as a technical program committee member of the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), and the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS). He has been the Coordinator of international research projects in the field of semiconductor devices and circuits.

Prof. Fang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He has been working in the MEMS field for 20 years. He received his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) in 1995. His doctoral research focused on the determining of the mechanical properties of thin films using MEMS structures. In 1995, he worked as a postdoctoral research for LIGA project at Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Taiwan. He joined the Power Mechanical Engineering Department at the National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) in 1996, where he is now a Professor as well as a faculty of NEMS Institute. From June to September 1999, he was at California Inst. of Tech. as a visiting associate. He has established a world-class MEMS testing and characterization lab. His research interests include MEMS with emphasis on micro physical sensors and actuators, micro fabrication/packaging technologies, CMOS MEMS, micro optical systems, and characterization of thin film mechanical properties. Prof. Fang has published more than 110 SCI journal papers, near 180 international conference papers, and 60 patents (all in MEMS field). He is now the Board Member of JMM (SCI journal), and the Associate Editor of IEEE Sensors J., JM3 (SCI journals) and JSTS (J. of Semiconductor Tech. and Science, published by the IEE of Korea). He has served as the chief delegate of Taiwan for World Micromachine Summit since 2008. He also served as the TPC (Technical program committee) of IEEE MEMS’04, MEMS’07, and MEMS’10, the TPC of Transducers’07, and the EPC of Transducers’09 and Transducers’11. He has become the member of international steering committee of Transducers from 2009. He serves as the Asia Regional Program Co-Chair of IEEE Sensors 2010, and the TPC Chair of IEEE NEMS 2011. He also serves as the Steering Committee for APCOT (Asia Pacific Conf. on Transducers) from 2008-2012, and the TPC Co-chair for APCOT 2008. There are 26 PhD and 60 Master students graduated from Prof. Fang’s group so far. Most of them are working in the MEMS and micro sensors related companies, such as TSMC, UMC, ADI, InvenSense, Qualcomm, APM, tMt, Sitronix, PixArt, Domintech, WindTop, etc. He is now the MEMS committee member of SEMI Taiwan. He is the standing committee member of the Nanotechnology and Micro System Association (NMA), Taiwan. He also serves as the chair of the Technology Development and the International Collaboration Committee in NMA. Moreover, Prof. Fang serves as the technical consultant for many MEMS companies in Taiwan.

Dr. Martin Gall is currently department head of Materials and Reliability for Micro- and Nanoelectronics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing in Dresden, Germany (FhG IZFP-D). He received the title of Diplomphysiker (M.S. in physics) from the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany, in 1992, and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, USA, in 1999. He joined the Motorola Semiconductor Division (later to become Freescale Semiconductor) in 1995 as an engineer and has since been working in the area of backend reliability, mainly addressing issues with electromigration, stress-induced voiding, and time-dependent dielectric breakdown. From 2002 until 2009, he managed the interconnect reliability team in Freescale Semiconductor’s Technology Solutions Organization, mainly focusing on implementation of advanced, low-k dielectrics in the 65, 45, 32 and 22 nm nodes. From 2007 until 2009, he was assigned to the IBM/Freescale Semiconductor Technology Alliance in Yorktown Heights and Hopewell Junction, NY. He relocated back to Europe in 2010 to join GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Dresden, Germany, and subsequently the Fraunhofer Institute in 2011.

Dr. Chao-Kun Hu is a Research Staff Member in the Reliability and Materials Sciences Department at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM. He received his Ph.D. degree in physics from Brandeis University in 1979. He was a research associate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before he joined IBM in 1984. He was involved in the development of multilevel on-chip Cu and Al(Cu) interconnections fabrications at the IBM Yorktown Silicon Facility. His current research is in the area of on-chip interconnections electromigration reliability. He received IBM Research Division Award for the first demonstration of integration of Cu-polyimide wiring on silicon IC chips in 1991. He was one of the recipients of IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award in 1998, IBM Corporate Awards in 1999 and 2006 in appreciation for his contributions in Copper Interconnect Technology and Invention of The Year 2006 by NY Intellectual Property Law Association.

Agis A. Iliadis (M’83–SM’01) received his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), Manchester, U.K. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Director of the Semiconductor Nanotechnology Research Laboratory, and a member of the Maryland NanoCenter, of the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA. He is a member of the IEEE Electron Device Society and IEEE Reliability Society, a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Device Society, an Ad-Com member of the IEEE EDS Educational Activities Committee, and the Chair of the IEEE-EDS Master and PhD Student Fellowship Committee. He has served as an Ad-Com member of the IEEE-EDS Technical Committee on Electronic Materials, and was the EDS Representative of the IEEE-USA Professional Activities Board (PACE). He is also a member of the Society of Photonic and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), and the Institute of Physics (U.K.). He has organized and served in several Conference Committees. His contributions and research interests focus on improving performance and reliability of electronic devices and materials, including ohmic and Schottky metallizations in III-V and wide band gap semiconductors, the development of metal-oxide semiconductor nanostructures like ZnO through self-assembly and thin films through pulsed laser deposition on Si and other substrates, nanostructured chemical sensors, surface acoustic wave (SAW) bio sensors, and the effects of electromagnetic interference on CMOS ICs.

Chee Wee Liu (M’99–SM’00) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei, Taiwan, in 1985 and 1987, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1994. /Vs at low temperature. He was the IEDM TPC member in 2008-2009 and subcommittee chair (SSN) in 2010. He received 2003-2005 Outstanding Research Award, National Science Council, Taiwan. Details in http://nanosioe.ee.ntu.edu.tw

Massimo Vanzi (Bologna, May 13, 1954) graduated in Physics at the University of Bologna in 1978. From 1980 to 1992 he worked at Telettra S.p.A. on studying reliability issue of semiconductor electronic circuits and analytical techniques development required from these activities. In the 1985/1986 he was Senior Expert of the ONU's ITU Agency at Telebras, Campinas, Brazil. On 1992 he became Associated Professor of Solid State Electronics at the Electronic Engineering Course of the University of Cagliari. Since then, he focused his work on Reliability, by means of much cooperation with European Labs, like ETH Zurich, IXL Bordeaux, Fraunhofer inst. Darmstadt. Particular efforts have been spent on photonic devices, within cooperation with Pirelli Cavi, Milan. Since 1998 he opened the course of Reliability and Diagnostics of Electron Devices and Systems, where he gives account of the know-how and of the daily upgrading on technology, characterization and analysis on electron and photon devices. Since October 2001 he is Full Professor of Electronics. On 2001 he was the General Chairman of the International Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits (WOCSDICE2001, May, Cagliari) and for the year 2002 he is the Chairman of the Technical Committee of ESREF 2002, one of the three international appointments (the only European one) on Reliability and Diagnostics of semiconductor Devices. On 2007/08 he has been a member of the ESA Work Group on Laser Diodes, whose task is the definition of the qualification criteria for such devices in space applications. On 2009 and 2010 he has been the organizer and the scientific chairman of the 1st and 2nd International Symposium on Reliability of Optoelectronics for Space applications (ISROS2009), a new event focused on reliability of photonic devices in such a special environment as space. The worldwide adhesion of all the space agencies has welcome this proposal, together with the participation of the most important experts in the field of reliability of photonics. The M. Vanzi's research topics are the physical and electrical characterization of semiconductor electronic devices and the physics mechanism of failures discovered. This activity is divided into the following chief arguments: - Characterization of technologies and electronic devices Micrologics TTL-Schottky: study of metal boundaries degradation into the CMOS Schottky bipolar devices. The study of the Latch-Up phenomena into the CMOS devices using electron microscopy special techniques. VLSI devices. Microelectronic modelling and planning of a test pattern for studying current crowding phenomena of metal-semiconductor contacts. Particle detectors. Theoretical interpretation of signals propagation into microstrip detectors. - Development and application of new investigation techniques, especially for large scale integration devices and photonic devices. TEM: study of tunneling phenomena onto rough surface with 3D maps obtained from TEM images statistics. TEM analysis of semiconductor laser degradations. Electronic holography: theoretical and practical study of Schroedinger wave distortions made from microfields associated to pn junctions observed by TEM. EBIC/FIB/TEM: procedure for analyzing by TEM the degradations of semiconductor laser. EBT: development and design patent of a new technique for isolating the logical anomalies of integrated devices comparing Voltage Contrast maps. - Reliability of new developed technologies (programmable devices, ECL devices, Schottky, COMS, plastic package devices, MESFETs, Laser) The researches on compound semiconductor devices (GaN MESFETs) and on optoelectronic devices (TLC Lasers) are relevant in this project. GaAs MESFETs and GaAs HEMTs: study of thermic effects made from high currents and high temperatures associated with these: the parametric degradations of MESFETs have been explained from the identification of electromigration effects into more stressed metallization and of gate metallization/semiconductor penetration (gate sinking). Development of an innovative technique to detect the "gate sinking" phenomena through selective removal criteria of semiconductor layer for observing back metal contact surface. TEM employment for observing thin sections of real devices for studying and characterizing no alloy ohmic contacts on GaN. Some variations driven from continued thermic treatments of GaAs/Pd/Ge contacts have been detected using this technique; other techniques did not found explanation for the resistance increasing. Microinteractions visualization of contacts of gate submicrometric Schottky Ti/Pt/Au - GaAs devices carrying out life tests and correspondence of these phenomena with electrical observed characteristics.