LUIGI COLOMBO
Dr. Luigi Colombo received a BS in Physics from Iona College, 1975, and a PhD in Materials Science, University of Rochester in 1980. He was also a Research Associate, University of Rochester, from 1980 to 1981 where he worked on the electrical properties of dislocations in alkali halides.
In 1981 he joined Texas Instruments (TI) to work on infrared detector materials for night vision applications. Dr. Colombo developed HgCdTe bulk crystals for Infrared Detectors for the fire and forget Javelin program in the 1980’s, and later developed the more manufacturable process Liquid Phase Epitaxy (LPE) of HgCdTe. The LPE process Dr. Colombo developed enabled the Infrared Device groups at TI to win many government contracts totaling more than $100M over a 4 year period. His processes and equipment designed in the early 1990’s are still in production today at DRS Network & Imaging Systems, LLC supporting the US DoD’s night vision needs.
Dr. Colombo joined the Semiconductor Group at TI, 1996, where he developed high-k capacitor MIM structures using BaSrTiO3 dielectrics for DRAMs, worked on critical PbZrTiO3 based FRAM processes still in production at TI today, low leakage SiON/poly-Si and Hf-based high-k gate/metal transistor gate stacks for advanced transistor devices beyond the 90 nm node. During this period Dr. Colombo managed a team of engineers and scientists responsible for the development of the materials, design of deposition systems in collaboration with equipment suppliers, process development and integration of these material in the silicon flow for various nodes.
From 2008 to 2017 Dr. Colombo was responsible, as an assignee to the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), for the development of new by materials, ie.graphene, hexagonal boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides, and their integration in new device flows. He also developed what is now the most widely used graphene growth process on Cu by chemical vapor deposition in collaboration with researchers, UT Austin. This work was cited for the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Committee.
Dr. Colombo has authored and co-authored over 170 refereed papers, delivered over 200 invited and contributed presentations, written 5 chapters in edited books, and holds over 120 US and international patents. Dr. Colombo is on the Strategic Advisory Council (SAC) of the European Graphene Flagship, has been on the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science External Advisory Board, SRC-NRI Technical Program Group, and SRC-STARnet Strategic Advisory Board. He is also an IEEE Fellow, APS Fellow, and a retired TI Fellow. After retiring from TI, in addition to continuing with his duties on SAC of the Graphene Flagship, he is a consultant at DRS Network & Imaging Systems, LLC, Graphenea Inc., and Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas.
