IEEE Honors Baliga With Lamme Medal
The Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers awarded B. Jayant Baliga '74 the
1999 IEEE Lamme Medal, honoring him for his "sustained, innovative contributions
to power semiconductor technology, which has had widespread impact on
power electronic systems."
Baliga is distinguished university professor of electrical engineering
at North Carolina State University and director of the Power Semiconductor
Research Center, Raleigh, an industrial consortium that he founded there
in 1991.
While working at the GE Corporate Research Laboratory from 1974
to 1988, he developed many power device structures now widely used by
the power electronics industry. Among these is the Insulated Gate Bipolar
Transistor produced by numerous semiconductor companies for use in appliance
controls, robotics, automotive ignition, electric cars, and most recently
in a compact, portable defibrillator for cardiac arrest victims.
His work also has had a significant impact on the field of materials
research for high-power devices. Using the "Baliga's Figure of Merit,"
a fundamental equation derived by him in 1979, performance of power field
effect transistors has been projected to improve by a factor of 2,000
times by replacing silicon with silicon carbide. This has stimulated a
worldwide effort to develop a new generation of power devices for the
21st century.
Baliga
has published extensively and holds 99 patents including one selected
for the 1995 B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award given at the Inventors
Hall of Fame. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National
Academy of Engineering. He was selected among the 100 Brightest Young
Scientists in America by Science Digest magazine in 1984, and was
named by Scientific American magazine in 1997 as among the eight heroes
of the semiconductor revolution.
Baliga
holds a doctorate and master's degree from Rensselaer and a bachelor's
degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
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© 1999 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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