Two at ECE earn prestigious 2015 Presidential Fellowship award
Ye Shao and Cosan Caglayan were selected by Ohio State's Graduate School for their “outstanding scholarship and research ability.”
The Graduate School awards about 15 Presidential Fellowships each semester, providing financial support so each winner may devote one year of full-time study to the completion of a dissertation or degree project unimpeded by other duties. Competitions are held autumn and spring semesters.
“The Presidential Fellowship is the most competitive and prestigious scholarly recognition provided by the Ohio State Graduate School,” Associate Dean Scott Herness said.
Caglayan said he is proud to earn the Presidential fellowship.
“I believe this award will strongly support my research on its course to obtain traction in the field. This is especially important since my dissertation is based on invention of a disruptive technology, which can be transformational for the electronics testing industry and thus can impact the society. As such, I have no doubt that being selected as a recipient of this prestigious award will enhance the recognition of this technology,” he said.
Caglayan is mentored by ECE Prof. Kubilay Sertel.
Shao said winning the Presidential fellowship will help advance his work in the next generation of electronics technology. He is advised by ECE Prof. Wu Lu. He is a sixth-year Ph.D. student who earned his M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Southeast University in China in 2009. That same year he began working in the area of Solid State Electronics within Lu’s “High Speed Devices and Circuit Lab.”
“I’m very surprised and excited to win the award, since Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious and highly-competitive award for graduate students at OSU. This award will be great encouragement to my current Ph.D study and career in the future. I’m very grateful to all those who helped me in the past. The solid state electronics is an experimental subject. It requires both solid device physics knowledge and excellent hands-on experience of microelectronics processing and characterization,” he said. “Luckily, I chose the ECE program at OSU and Prof. Lu’s group. In the past five years, my advisor passed his device physics knowledge with patience and enthusiasm; my senior group mates shared their cleanroom processing experience selflessly; the staff and technicians at Dreese cleanroom and Nanotech West provided their best support to every researcher here. I also had good collaborate experience with professors and graduate students from other groups in the ECE department. They really helped me a lot.”
Shao said receiving the fellowship award encourages him to “strive for an excellent and productive research work in the final period of my Ph.D study. I believe I will devote my life to Solid State Electronics.”
“My research is focused on wide bandgap semiconductor nanowire field effect transistors and resonant tunneling devices. It is well known that the history of the semiconductor industry is a story of Moore's Law. However, the end of Moore's Law has been predicted for the near future, as the transistor’s overly-reduced gate length eventually loses control of current flow. Gate-all-around transistors with one-dimensional nanowires (NWs) as the device channel surrounded by a gate to control the flow of current are considered as one of potential candidates for next generation electronics. In addition, unique properties also make NW an ideal candidate for resonant tunneling devices (RTDs) with extremely high switching speed (in terahertz range) for future high frequency and THz communications. Before this becomes a reality, however, unless some fundamental issues of semiconductor NWs are clarified, it is hard to realize breakthroughs on device performance.”
Shao said his Ph.D. research aims to address these issues as they apply to metallic contacts, electron transport, groundbreaking advancements in NW RTDs and high performance GaN NW-based devices.
