Date: February 22, 2016

Time: 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Location: Maeder Hall, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Professor Tomás Palacios of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will present “System-Level Applications of Two-Dimensional Materials: Challenges and Opportunities” as part of a joint seminar hosted by the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

ABSTRACT
Two dimensional materials represent the next frontier in advanced materials for electronic applications. Their extreme thinness (3 or less atoms thick) gives them great mechanical flexibility, optical transparency and an unsurpassed surface-to-volume ratio. At the same time, this family of materials has tremendously diverse and unique properties. For example, graphene is a semimetal with extremely high electron and hole mobilities, hexagonal boron nitride forms an almost ideal insulator, while MoS2 and other dichalcogenides push the limits on large area semiconductors.

The successful growth of these materials over large areas has allowed their use in numerous system-level demonstrators. For example, the zero bandgap of graphene and its ambipolar has been used in a wide variety of rf and mixed applications, including frequency multipliers, mixers, oscillators and digital modulators. At the same time, the wide bandgap of MoS2 in combination with advanced fabrication technology has enabled its use in memory cells, analog to digital converters and ring oscillators with orders of magnitude better performance than other materials for large area applications. These and other examples will be discussed to highlight the numerous new opportunities of 2D materials.

BIO
Tomás Palacios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Advanced Semiconductor Materials and Devices Group.  His research focuses on the combination of new semiconductor materials and device concepts to advance the fields of information technology, biosensors and energy conversion. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the DARPA, ONR and NSF Young Investigator Awards, the IEEE George Smith Award, and numerous best paper awards at conferences such as IEDM, DRC and ISCS. Prof. Palacios has authored more than 200 contributions on advanced semiconductor devices in international journals and conferences, 40 of them invited, 5 book chapters and 20 patents. He is the founding director of the MIT Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems (MIT-CG), as well as a recently-funded AFOSR MURI on flexible 2D electronics.