Azad Naeemi, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech, has received an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship.

This honor is given by the European Commission for visiting researchers who want to carry out research and teaching assignments and scholarly work for the Erasmus Mundus Masters (EMM) in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.  The scholarship provides travel and living expenses to visit one (or more) of the four partner universities for up to three months.

Naeemi plans to use his award to visit IMEC-Belgium this summer. He will formulate a concrete collaborative research plan to address the connectivity challenges in nanoscale integrated circuits. In addition, his Ph.D. student, Chenyun Pan, will also spend this summer at IMEC working on a joint research project in developing predictive models for the potential performance of processors implemented with emerging devices and interconnects. 

An ECE faculty member since 2008, Naeemi explores emerging nanoelectronic devices and interconnects, and investigates novel circuit and system concepts for promising emerging devices and interconnects. He is particularly interested in devices based on novel computational state variables such as electron spin in which information is coded in the spin orientation of electrons rather than in their electric field.

In spring 2013, Naeemi received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, enabling him to develop experimentally-validated physical models for graphene interconnects and to optimize and benchmark them against conventional metallic interconnects. This work will potentially enable the design and development of faster and more energy efficient on-chip interconnects using two-dimensional nanomaterials such as graphene.

Naeemi is a member of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Technical Working Group on Interconnects. He has co-authored eight book chapters and more than 100 papers in refereed journals and international conferences.