Tak H. Ning

Co-inventor and developer of the polysilicon-emitter self-aligned bipolar transistor, which is the basis of all modern bipolar transistor technology, Ning has made foundational contributions to semiconductor device physics. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971. Prior to joining IBM at Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1973, he served as a research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois where he did research on the theory of impurity centers in silicon, the transport of electrons in MOS surface inversion layers, and developed a theory for the oxide-charge scattering of electrons in MOS inversion layers. He has also served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and spent 20 years at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center where he received numerous invention and achievement awards.

During the early part of his IBM career, Ning and his colleagues made significant contributions to the understanding of hot-electron effects and electron and hole trapping in MOSFETs, including the discovery and modeling of substrate-hot-electron effects. They demonstrated the shallow-emitter effect and its dependence on emitter-contact material. They invented and developed the polysilicon-emitter self-aligned bipolar transistor, which is the basis of all modern bipolar transistor technology. They also invented the substrate-plate trench-capacitor DRAM cell, which was widely used in stand-alone DRAM products for several generations and was used in embedded DRAM designs.

As Senior Manager of the Silicon Device Technology department between 1982 and 1991, he directed and contributed to the development of submicron bipolar and CMOS technologies in IBM Research, and also led his team in exploring SOI and EEPROM devices. In 1991, he was appointed an IBM Fellow, the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Following that appointment, Ning focused much of his technical work on understanding the limits of CMOS and exploring the opportunities in silicon technology beyond scaling CMOS. His exploration focused on SOI-CMOS-based opportunities including soft-error reduction, high-voltage, EEPROM, and RF devices.

He also represented IBM at the Executive Advisory Board of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, a consortium of semiconductor companies funding university research in semiconductors. Ning has participated in many IEEE and professional society activities, including serving as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Electron Device Letters, a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Electron Device Society, a Program Committee Member of several technical conferences, and a Member or Chair of several IEEE award committees, including the IEEE Fellow Committee. He has been a member of the committee that published the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors from 1992 onward.

He has authored or co-authored more than 120 technical papers and 38 U.S. patents. Ning co-authored (with Yuan Taur) a book titled "Fundamentals of Modern VLSI Devices," which has been adopted as a graduate text by many universities worldwide and translated into Japanese. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the IEEE, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He received several awards, including the Electrochemical Society 2007 Gordon E. Moore Medal, the IEEE Electron Device Society 1989 J.J. Ebers Award, the IEEE 1991 Jack A. Morton Award, the 1998 Pan Wen-Yuan Foundation (Taiwan) Outstanding Research Award, and the IEEE 2000 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Best Paper Award.