John D. Cressler, his Ph.D. student Rajan Arora, and their colleagues from NASA Goddard and Vanderbilt University won the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference. The NSREC is the premier international conference dealing with radiation effects in electronic devices, circuits, and systems.

The paper, "Particle-Induced Latchup in a Cryogenic CMOS Readout Integrated Circuit," was presented at the conference held in July and will appear in the December 2010 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. It reports research results from a collaboration between a team at NASA Goddard, Dr. Cressler's team at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and a team at Vanderbilt University.

The work is aimed at understanding heavy ion induced, single event latchup in focal plane readout circuitry that operates at deep cryogenic temperatures, something that has long been considered impossible. The team made the initial observations of the cryogenic latchup events, and explained why they can and do occur, and the potential implications for a wide class of space-borne focal plane instruments. Further work on mitigation of such effects is in progress.

Dr. Cressler leads the SiGe Research Group in the School of ECE. He holds the title of Ken Byers Professor and has been a member of the ECE faculty at Georgia Tech since 2002.