Giorgio Baccarani

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Giorgio Baccarani
DEIS - Università di Bologna
Viale Risorgimento, 2 - 40136 - Bologna (ITALY)


Tel: ++39-051-2093012
Fax: +39-051-2093073
E-mail: gbaccarani@deis.unibo.it

Biography

Giorgio Baccarani (G.B.) received his Dr. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1967 and his Dr. degree in Physics in 1969, both from the University of Bologna, Italy. Since then, he has been at the former Institute of Electronics, now Department of Electronics, Computer and System Engineering (DEIS) of the above University, first as a teaching assistant, then (since 1972) as an associate professor of Quantum Electronics and, finally, (since 1980) as a full professor of Digital Electronics.
G.B. was a visiting scientist at the ATT-Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray-hill, NJ from 1969-70; at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in 1981-82 and, subsequently, in 1983 and in 1988. Also, he has been consulting with SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (now ST Microelectronics) in a number of research and development projects.
He is currently director of the Advanced-Research Center on Electronic Systems (ARCES) of the University of Bologna, and chairman of the Scientific Board of the Lab on Electronic Systems, jointly supported by the University of Bologna and ST Microelectronics. In addition, he is a member of the Scientific Committee of the ITC-IRST Institute (Trento, Italy), and of CNR-IMM Institute (Catania, Italy). He is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Bologna and a Fellow of the IEEE. During the period 1998-2001, he has been a member of the "Jack Morton" and the "Andy S. Grove" award Committees of the IEEE. At European level, he is a member of the joint CEC-NSF Committee for the promotion of joint European-American research initiatives in Information Technology; member of the MEDEA+ Scientific Committee and member of the ESSDERC/ESSCIRC Steering Committee.
In the past, he has been Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the National Institute for Microelectronics Technology (CNR-IMETEM); member of the Scientific Committee of the National Institute of Bio-electronics; member of the Long-Term Research Advisory Group (LTRAG) which was in charge of monitoring the long-term research activity supported by the European Commission and to provide recommendations to the latter. Also, he has been a member of the Pathfinder Committee, in charge of recommending a suitable research policy to the Commission in the area of Quantum Computing. Finally he has served in the evaluation board of the "Human Capital and Mobility" program and has reviewed several Esprit and IST projects.
From 1999 to 2001 G.B. has been European Editor of the IEEE Transaction on Electron Devices and is currently honorary Editor of the journal "Solid-State Electronics". He has been chairman of ESSDERC 1996 in Bologna, and of ESSDERC 2002 in Firenze, which has been jointly organized with ESSCIRC for the first time. Finally, he has organized and chaired the Fourth International Workshop on Future Information processing Technology (IWFIPT-2001), held in Gubbio, Italy. The latter is a joint initiative of the European Commission, the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC, USA) and the SIRIJ and STARC Organizations (Japan).

Research Activity

G.B. has devoted his research work to various aspects of Microelectronics, including processing technology, device physics and characterization, current transport in semiconductor materials and devices, sub-micron MOSFET optimization and design, numerical analysis of semiconductor devices, analog design, cognitive-system architecture, intelligent optical sensors for motion estimation and analog fuzzy processors for non-linear control. He has authored or coauthored about 150 papers, and his activity is the result of an extensive cooperation with national, European and American Industries, and with a number of research Institutions in Italy and abroad. In what follows, only a few selected results are illustrated.
In the field of processing technology, his most important contribution was an investigation on the feasibility of using photo-resist as a mask for selective doping of the semiconductor by ion implantation [3]. Such an activity was carried out at the ATT-Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1970.
In the area of device physics, he used for the first time Monte Carlo techniques for the simulation of silicon devices [16,17], highlighting non-stationary transport effects at the base collector junction, and analyzing transport properties in thin base regions which could be manufactured much later with the advent of molecular-beam epitaxy. Such pioneering studies date back to 1975, i.e. more than 10 years before any serious attempt to use Monte Carlo techniques for a better understanding of transport effects under non-stationary conditions.
In 1981 G.B. joined the IBM Research Division at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where he investigated the feasibility of 0.25 µm channel MOSFETs. The scaling theory, which had been formulated earlier by R. Dennard et al. with reference to the case of a constant field, was better formalized and generalized to account for independent scaling factors for the device physical dimensions and its applied voltages. The generalized scaling theory provided the guidelines for the optimization of the 0.25 µm channel MOSFET [30-32]. During a subsequent visit at IBM in the Summer of 1983, he worked out a novel hydrodynamic model of current transport in semiconductors, based on the higher-order moments of the Boltzmann transport equation [33].
In 1983 G.B. took the lead of a research team set up at the University of Bologna, with the goal of pursuing a long-term research project aiming at the development of a general-purpose semiconductor-device simulation tool. Such a project, supported by the European Community, advanced the state of the art in the simulation area by fulfilling unparalleled flexibility specifications, thus making the code suitable for a wide variety of different semiconductor devices. In order to achieve such a goal, a triangular-element mesh was used, due to the ability of triangular elements to conform to any curvilinear boundary. The simulation code was called HFIELDS [34] and it became soon very popular within the semiconductor Industry and many Universities and research Institutions. The code was delivered freely to several users, and was constantly updated and improved with new discretization strategies and convergence acceleration techniques [35,36]; new physical models [37] which were subsequently extended to include the transport properties of polycrystalline silicon [38,39]; to the development, for the first time within a device simulator, of the sensitivity analysis [42].
The latest development of his modeling activity has been a deterministic solver of the Boltzmann transport equation, which provides the energy distribution of the carriers in addition to carrier concentration and average energy at any point within the semiconductor device. The latter approach is based on the expansion of the distribution function in spherical harmonics, which successfully reduces the dimensionality of the phase space, thus allowing for a numerical solution of BTE in two physical dimensions and in energy. This project was part of an agreement with IBM's "General Technology Division" Essex Junction, VT. During the nineties, G.B. has been leading research work on cognitive architectures. The activity has been focused on three major themes: i) handwritten character recognition; ii) motion estimation for videophone application and, iii) fuzzy control systems. This activity was part of a cooperation agreement with ST Microelectronics. The work covered both automatic-synthesis algorithms and hardware implementation in analog form. In this context, a general-purpose, programmable, analog fuzzy processor was designed and manufactured. The latter is composed by a variable number of modular blocks, which can be automatically compiled under the control of the software system [94].
In year 2000, G.B. coordinated a proposal to the Ministry of University and Research for the institution of an excellence center aiming at the development of innovative electronic systems. The proposal was approved by the Ministry and funded with € 2.5 Million over a three-year time frame. This center, called "Advanced-Research Center on Electronic Systems" (ARCES) is now fully operational, with 100 people involved in research activities. The goal of the Center is to pursue cooperation with, and technology transfer to, Industry and to generate, protect and exploit intellectual property rights by promoting start-up initiatives. Also, it aims to achieve financial independence since year 2004, when the Ministry support will be discontinued.
Currently, the direction of ARCES absorbs the largest fraction of the activity carried out by G.B., but he keeps alive a few research interests by personally leading a small team involved in the IST Project 2000-30033 (DEMAND), where advanced characterization techniques of smart-power integrated circuits are being pursued, and by following the research activity on RF circuit design.

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