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Phase Transition Materials Research Leads to Dissertation Award for Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor

For his research in incorporating phase transition materials into electronics applications, Electrical Engineering Assistant Professor Ahmedullah Aziz has received the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation from the Association of Computing Machinery. His dissertation is entitled “Device-Circuit Co-Design Employing Phase Transition Materials for Low Power Electronics.”

Ahmedullah Aziz

Ahmedullah Aziz

About the Research: 

Phase transition materials have garnered immense interest in concurrent post-CMOS electronics, due to their unique properties, including electrically driven abrupt resistance switching, hysteresis, and high selectivity. The phase transitions can be attributed to diverse material-specific phenomena, including- correlated electrons, filamentary ion diffusion, and dimerization. As part of his doctoral research, Aziz explored the application space for these materials through extensive device-circuit co-design and proposed several novel device/circuit ideas harnessing their unique electrical properties.

Aziz’s current research portfolio comprises a diverse and wide domain of emerging electronics. He works on device-circuit co-design with CMOS and post-CMOS technologies to overcome daunting challenges that exist in the concurrent semiconductor industry. He explores and utilizes unique characteristics of complex materials like correlated oxides, ferroelectrics, and 2D transition metal di-chalcogenides to design novel devices and circuits for the next-generation processors and digital data storage.

About the Award: 

To encourage innovative, ground-breaking research in the area of electronic design automation, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) established this award to be given each year to an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation that makes the most substantial contribution to the theory and/or application in the field of electronic design automation.

This year, the award will be officially conferred in the Design Automation Conference (DAC), to be held in San Francisco, CA in early December.