YSU professor gives lecture at Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference in Salt Lake City

Each year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers hosts the Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference in Salt Lake City. A YSU professor of electrical engineering and recently promoted IEEE senior member, Vamsi Borra was invited by the IEEE Nanotechnology Council to give a lecture on his current research project.

Considered the largest coalition of electrical engineers in the world, the IEEE consists of more than 460,000 members across 190 different countries. The NMDC is the IEEE NTC’s flagship conference, and only a very select few are given the honor of presenting their current research topic. “I felt very honored to speak in front of such a respected group of professionals in my field,” Borra stated.

With collaborators from the Ohio State University and the University of Toledo, Borra and his team have been working on a concept called threshold switching, which is a newly proposed way to expedite and reduce the cost of creating VIAs, or the electrical connection between the metal layers on circuit boards.

“Making stacks of VIAs is a very expensive and time-consuming process...so, our goal is to make this a more cost-effective and less complex process,” he said.

To be selected to give an invited lecture, one must be renowned in their field and have a solid backing of both theory and experimental research. The conference organizers make their choices by finding the most currently relevant research along with its respective top researchers. “The other professors and I have proven ourselves through our strong backgrounds in the electrostatic field and threshold switching...we have solid experimental research that backs our theoretical model, and I think that’s a big part of why we were invited,” Borra explained.

When asked what this great honor means to him, Borra expressed just how privileged he felt to share his knowledge with respected figures in the field. “At the NMDC, you hear from people from some of the top universities in our field, like ETH Zurich, EPFL in Switzerland or Arizona State,” Borra said. He emphasized that it felt great to represent a place like YSU on such a big stage.

“YSU is small, yet people from all over the world came and said, ‘Oh, that is pretty cool!’ - we don’t need anyone’s approval, but we are doing something that’s catching the attention of the big people in the industry, and that means a lot to us,” he said.