interests

Electronics

There was a time when, I was almost obsessed by the subject, I have however lost most of the obsession eversince as the work I was persuing was not that inspiring. I am trying to regain the same slowly. I lost most touch with circuit designing during my M.Sc. in which I did a lot of pure physics. I was better off with quantum Mechanics thanks to Prof. Arvind Kumar of HBCSE.

I was succesful in getting a good GATE 96 (Graduate Apptitude Test in Engineering) which enabled me for a seat in the M. Tech. programme in IIT Bombay, Department of Electrical Engineering. The Microelectronics group in our depart ment mainly focuses on Device modeling, simulation and CAD for VLSI. Prof. J. M. Vasi, Prof. H. Narayanan, Prof. Rakesh Lal, Prof. A. N. Chandorkar and Prof. M. P. Desai are amonst the most popular faculty in the group. The group has two computation laboratories and one fabrication laboratory. One of the computation laboratory is sponsored by Intel . I completed the course in February 1998.

I am currently doing physical design of some telecom IC's.

WEB Designing

I started with WEB designing, when I was in IIT Bombay. I learnt most of HTML from the online documentation at the W3 . This is the second edition of my Web Page. HTML was not so difficult for me due toi its similarity to LaTex, which we use in IIT for documentation purposes. I have also written the IIT Bombay, Department of Electrical Engineering,INTEL Laboratory(internal), and the IIT Bombay, Continuing Education Programme home pages.

This Page also includes some JavaScripts, which I am currently learning. Most of the scripts I ahve used are sourced from www.javascriptsource.com

Research

I have not yet started off for a PhD, hence I have not done any specific research activty, but I plan to do research work mostly in VLSI Design, in the comming few years. However here is briefing of some of the work I did in my M.Sc. Project and in my M. Tech Project.

M.Sc. Project : `Photoconductivity Measurement in Diamond Thin films'

The project involved study of the conventional deposition techniques for diamond thin films and fabrication of an experimental setup to study photoconductivity in the films developed in our laboratory. In the first stage of the project, I studied the conventional diamond deposition techniques, especially the Hot filament CVD and the microwave plasma CVD. These two methods are used to make diamond films in our laboratory. I also studied the literature available on the photoconductivity in Diamond films, and on the techniques to measure photoconductivity in materials. hence I designed a setup for the measurement of photoconductivity.

In the second stage I actually fabricated the setup. By the end, of the term the testing of the setup was complete, and it did work at lower chopping frequencies(upto 100Hz), however there were problems at higher chopping frequencies, wherein the mechanical chopper was not stable, and the lockin amplifier could not lockin to the chopper.

M. Tech. Project: `Modeling of the degradation in a Flash EEPROM'

The project first stage of the project covered a literature survey of the technology of Non-volatile memories, from the first FAMOS memory developed by Intel, upto the present day, highdensity Flash memories involving bipolarity, Fowler-Nordheim tunneling for both program and erase. A study of some I-V models of floating gate MOSFET's, write/erase models of EEPROMs and a write model for the HIMOS type flash, tunnel oxide degradation mechanisms causing degradation of the retention and endurance characteristics was made.

In the remaining part of the project I was involved in the modeling of degradation due to trap formation, by hot-hole injection into the oxide. A analytical model based on a lucky hole model was developed, to determine the number of injected holes into the oxide which cause the degradation of the endurance characteristics.