Congratulations to Mr. Samarth Jain, a Research Engineer under the supervision of Associate Professor Ang Kah Wee and Assistant Professor Fong Xuanyao Kelvin from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for receiving the Young Researcher Award at the 2024 International Conference on Solid-State Devices and Materials (SSDM). This marks the third consecutive year that the award has been won by a researcher from the Advanced Nanotechnology Group led by A/Prof Ang, following the achievements of Sifan Li in 2023 and Yu-Chieh Chien in 2022.
The SSDM conference, renowned for its focus on cutting-edge developments in solid-state devices and materials, recognized Samarth’s outstanding contributions to neuromorphic computing. His award-winning paper, titled “Heterogeneous Integration of 32 x 32 1S1R Crossbar Array using 2D Hafnium Diselenide on a Si Platform and its Compute-in-Memory Hardware Featuring Low Latency and High Energy Efficiency,” was selected for this prestigious accolade.
The recognition comes after more than two years of dedicated research, which began with the synthesis of two-dimensional (2D) materials, optimization of device performance, circuit design, and algorithm development, culminating in the successful implementation of a system-level neural network hardware accelerator. Notably, their research advanced the growth of wafer-scale 2D HfSe2 thin films and developed a metal-assisted van der Waals (vdW) transfer technique, which enabled large-scale 2D memristor crossbar arrays to be heterogeneously integrated onto a Si platform. Furthermore, the integration of these crossbar arrays with custom-designed peripheral circuits enabled the complete hardware implementation of convolutional image processing with remarkable accuracy and energy efficiency.
