The IEEE Board of Directors named Chenming Hu as the recipient of the 2020 IEEE Medal of Honor – IEEE’s highest medal. The IEEE Foundation sponsors the IEEE Medal of Honor.
Hu is the TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is being recognized “for a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3-D device structures, that have helped keep Moore’s Law going over many decades.”
Moore’s Law has driven the spectacular advances in the semiconductor industry, thus changing the world. But it became apparent that device physics would bring an end to the continual shrinking of device dimensions. His revolutionary 3-D transistor structure, the FinFET, overcame those physical barriers and has been replacing the transistors used by industry for the past five decades. In addition, his BSIM transistor model for circuit design has become the industry standard, and his BERT reliability simulation tool has greatly advanced device and circuit reliability.
Hu has made many extraordinary contributions to the industry over his career, and his groundbreaking work has earned him IEEE’s highest honor.
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