Palacios named Associate Director of new semiconductor research center; Jing Kong, Farnaz Niroui, Luqiao Liu, and Bilge Yildiz to act as PI’s.

By By Meghan Melvin and Jane Halpern

February 28, 2023 | Microsystems Technology Laboratories | Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Tomás Palacios has been named Associate Director of the SUPeRior Energy-efficient Materials and dEvices (SUPREME) Center. Image courtesy of the subject.

Tomás Palacios has been named Associate Director of the SUPeRior Energy-efficient Materials and dEvices (SUPREME) Center, a new research center which will bring together researchers from nine different higher education institutions with a focus on developing energy-efficient semiconductor materials and technologies. Palacios is Director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and Professor of Electrical Engineering within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. Besides Palacios, four other MIT faculty members will be acting as PI’s for the new center: Professor of EE Jing Kong, Assistant Professor Farnaz Niroui, Associate Professor Luqiao Liu, and Professor of Nuclear Science, Materials Science and Engineering Bilge Yildiz.

Sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and one of the seven centers funded by SRC’s JUMP 2.0 consortium, the center represents a partnership between Cornell; MIT; Boise State University; Georgia Institute of Technology; North Carolina State University; Northwestern University; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Rochester Institute of Technology; Stanford University; Yale University; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Notre Dame.

Cornell Professor of Engineering Huili Grace Xing will be the center’s director; in a press release from Cornell, she said, “Our center will focus on the material science, the new device architectures and how they interplay with each other… “We want technology that can use as little energy as possible but provide as much function as possible. That is essential if we want to propagate equality,” Xing said. “If we’re able to lower the energy consumption for all of those essential means we want to have in modern life, we can lower the barrier for everybody to have access to information, to have access for education, and to have access to opportunities.”

Tomás Palacios received his PhD from the University of California – Santa Barbara, and his undergraduate degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). A world expert in Gallium Nitride electronics for both radio frequency and power applications, Palacios and his group have also made seminal contributions to two-dimensional materials and devices, and their heterogeneous integration with state-of-the-art silicon electronics. As Associate Director of the new SUPREME Center, Prof. Palacios will oversee more than 40 different research tasks, 10 of them at MIT, spanning from advanced new electronic materials, to novel semiconductor devices and systems that can push microelectronics to a new level of performance.