2019 Technical Excellence Award

Presented to Professor Jian-Ping Wang from University of Minnesota

Established in 1991, the Technical Excellence Award is an incentive and recognition program for research of exceptional value to SRC members. This prestigious award is shared equally among key contributors for innovative technology that significantly enhances the productivity and competitiveness of the semiconductor industry.

Essential aspects that are considered in the selection process include creativity, relevance to SRC research objectives, value to industry, and technology transfer.

This year, the 2019 honor is presented to Professor Jian-Ping Wang from University of Minnesota, for "Innovations and Discoveries in Nanomagnetics and Novel Materials that Accelerated the Production of Magnetic Random-access Memories"

Professor Wang is a science and technology leader in materials, magnetism, and nanomagnetic devices, such as magnetic random-access memory. He is recognized for:

• His pioneering work in exchange coupled magnetic media,
• The discovery that atomic-scale layers of ruthenium are ferromagnetic at room temperature. Ruthenium is only the 4^th element known to have such unique character to date,
• The first realization of high spin–orbit torque due to quantum confinement in sputtered BixSe1-x films.  This material provides both higher performance and an industrially-friendly deposition approach relative to previous materials and approaches,
• The co-development of the first Scaling Roadmap for integrated spin-transfer torque magnetic memory

His work is used by: Micron, Intel, Qualcomm, TSMC, IBM, GF, and other semiconductor companies. In 2019, Intel announced embedding spin-transfer torque memory devices using its 22-nm FinFET process and acknowledged Prof. Wang’s SRC research contributions.