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Asif Khan has been named as one of the 10 awardees of the 2020 Intel Rising Star Award. Khan is an assistant professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The purpose of the program is to help promote the careers of early career faculty members who show great promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies and to foster long term collaborative relationships with Intel. The awards were given based on progressive research in computer science, engineering, and social science in support of the global digital transition in the following areas: software, security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process.

Khan joined the ECE faculty in 2017, with a courtesy appointment with the School of Materials Science and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015.

Khan’s research is on advanced semiconductor devices—devices that will shape the future of computing in the post-scaling era. His group is currently focusing on ferroelectric devices on all aspects ranging from materials physics, growth and electron microscopy to device fabrication, all the way to ferroelectric circuits and systems for artificial intelligence/machine learning/variable load applications. 

His research group consists of five graduate students and two research staff members. They publish in venues such as the International Electron Devices Meeting, the Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, IEEE Electron Device Letters, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Nature Electronics, Nature Materials, Nano Letters, and Nature.

Khan’s program is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency. His Ph.D. research led to the first experimental demonstration of the negative capacitance effect in ferroelectrics, which can reduce the energy dissipation in CMOS technology below the fundamental thermodynamic (Boltzmann) limit. One of his publications was cited as one of the nine significant papers in the history of ferroelectricity in a 2020 editorial article in Nature Materials, celebrating the 100th year since the discovery of ferroelectricity in 1920.