IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022 - 17

2022 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal
Sponsored by the IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa
Medal Fund
IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal
Sponsored by Intel Corporation
Umesh Kumar Mishra
Jingsheng Jason Cong
For fundamental contributions to elecFor
contributions to the development of
gallium nitride-based electronics
A driving force behind the revolution in the electronics applications
of gallium-nitride (GaN)-based semiconductors, Umesh Kumar
Mishra is helping enable advances in 5G base stations, electronics
for high-power/low-signature solid-state radar, and highly
efficient power switching. Mishra and his group at the University
of California, Santa Barbara and Transphorm, have been leading the
global effort in developing GaN electronics such as high electron
mobility transistors (HEMTs). He demonstrated in 1996 that GaN
HEMTs could produce microwave power surpassing the incumbent
GaAs-based technology's performance in power density, shaking
the radio-frequency solutions landscape. Mishra then developed
a new GaN technology using the opposite face of the GaN crystal
called N-polar GaN. This face was widely believed to be unusable,
as growth on this plane resulted in rough films with uncontrolled
conductivity. However, the promise of HEMTs on N-polar GaN,
based on predictions of polarization physics by Mishra, drove his
team to overcome the technological challenges. N-polar GaN has
revolutionized millimeter-wave power performance at frequencies
critical for military and commercial applications with a 300%
improvement in power density at 94 GHz, a particularly difficult
frequency for solid-state amplifiers to serve. GaN promises to be
the material powering most communications and radar in the future.
In power electronics, nearly 10% of electricity in the U.S. is
wasted on power conversion, and reducing these losses can save
money and eliminate reliance on coal-fired power plants and their
effects on the climate. The GaN-on-silicon technologies developed
by Mishra and his team have become essential tools in eliminating
waste in power conversion. A useful high-voltage power conversion
device using GaN and the adoption of field plates in 2001
and the development of enhancement mode p-gate GaN HEMT
technology in 2006 are used in many adapters powered by GaN today.
Normally-off GaN-based power converters are being adopted
in adapters, power supplies for data servers, telecommunications,
uninterruptible power supplies, electric vehicle chargers, and nextgeneration
photovoltaic micro-inverters.
An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of
Engineering, Mishra is the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Electrical
and Computer Engineering at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA, and CTO of Transphorm.
Scope: For outstanding contributions to material and device science
and technology, including practical application.
tronic design automation and FPGA design
methods
Jingsheng Jason Cong's innovative contributions to electronic
design automation (EDA) tools and field programable gate-array
(FPGA) synthesis have enabled the efficient management of the
exponential growth of design complexity of semiconductor chips
that power our computation and communication infrastructures.
FPGAs are semiconductor devices based on a matrix of configurable
logic gates connected via programmable interconnects that
can be reprogrammed to desired application requirements after
manufacturing. As FPGAs grow in complexity to hundreds of
millions of logic gates, it is essential to have EDA tools that can
efficiently manage such complexity. Cong has made seminal contributions
in three key areas of EDA tool development: logic synthesis
algorithms for FPGAs, interconnect optimization algorithms
for physical design, and high-level synthesis from programming
languages friendly to software programmers. Cong's research set
the foundation of FPGA synthesis technology with a polynomial
time-depth-optimal mapping algorithm for look-up-table-based
FPGA designs that is now a cornerstone in all FPGA synthesis
tools. Cong's research then shifted emphasis to high-level synthesis
(HLS). His group developed xPilot, a platform-based HLS system
that is capable of generating high-quality designs with drastic
reduction of design time and improvement in performance. His
team made a number of algorithmic innovations in HLS, such as
scheduling using systems of difference constraints, efficient patternmining
based resource sharing, scheduling with soft constraints,
behavior-level don't-care analysis and optimization, and automatic
memory partitioning. Cong is also a leader in customizable computing.
He led the Customizable Domain-Specific Computing
project in 2009 (funded by a U.S National Science Foundation
Expeditions in Computing Award), which made an important shift
from parallelization to customization using his HLS technology
and demonstrated orders of magnitude performance and energy
efficiency improvements in many application domains, including
deep learning, medical imaging, and genomic sequencing analysis.
An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy
of Engineering, Cong is the Valene Chair for Engineering Excellence
with the Computer Science Department at the University
of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Scope: For exceptional contributions to the microelectronics industry.
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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022

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