IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - 12

IEEE MEDAL OF HONOR

2009 IEEE Medal of Honor
Sponsored by IEEE Foundation

Robert H. Dennard

For invention of the single-transistor Dynamic Random Access Memory and
for developing scaling principles for integrated circuits
reduction of MOS integrated circuit dimensions and
predicts the benefits of such reduction in improved circuit
performance, lower power and greater density. They
showed how to design devices and highly integrated
circuits at the micrometer level at a time when device
fabrication was at much larger dimensions. In the 1980s,
he generalized the original work to show how to design
devices down to submicrometer dimensions with further
improvements in performance and density. The scaling
concept led the way from the 5-µm devices of the early
1970s to today's 0.045-µm devices used in Gigabit
memory chips and powerful microprocessors.

Robert H. Dennard has been a pioneering figure in the
semiconductor industry. His invention of one-transistor
dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and contributions to principles of scaling MOS devices brought about
far-reaching and fundamental changes in science and
technology, impacting a broad range of industries from
aviation to telecommunications.
He was granted a patent for DRAM in 1968, and it first
began to appear in products in the 1970s. Now used by
all computer component and system manufacturers,
DRAM requires less power and costs much less than
previous magnetic memory and also is less complex and,
therefore, denser than the other semiconductor memory
cells previously developed. At the time of its development, the largest memory configuration in a computer
was 1 MB, requiring several kilowatts of power, while
today 1 to 2 GB of DRAM is common, requiring only a
few watts of power.

Dr. Dennard's research career spans over 50 years and
includes 52 U.S. patents and many awards and recognitions, including the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, the
IEEE Edison Medal, the National Medal of Technology
and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 2009, Dr. Dennard was named recipient of the
Charles Stark Draper Prize. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr.
Dennard is an IBM Fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson
Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where
he continues to investigate the limits of scaling and
future evolution of microelectronics.

Dr. Dennard's development of scaling theory has also
been a driving force in microelectronics. Along with some
researchers, Dr. Dennard developed a concept of MOS
transistor and circuit scaling that provides for systematic

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - Cover1
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - Cover2
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - 1
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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - 36
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - Cover3
IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - Cover4
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