Professor Srabanti Chowdhury is the latest addition to EE's Meet our Faculty! playlist.

Our video playlist currently showcases nine EE faculty. They share information about their research and interests. The brief videos are relevant to anyone who may have an interest in materials, mathematics, physics, the environment – and more! Learn directly from faculty what energizes them about their area of research.

Srabanti leads the Wide-Bandgap (WBG) Lab, with a diverse and interdisciplinary group of students and postdocs. The students in the WBG-Lab come from various backgrounds including in Mechanical, Chemical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering.

The WBG Lab focuses on wide-bandgap semiconductors such as Gallium Nitride (GaN), Diamond, Gallium Oxide, and others in the family, to deliver innovative device technologies that can provide solutions for the growing demands for efficiency, versatility, compactness, and robustness in electronics. While most of today’s devices and gadgets have been made possible thanks to Silicon (Si), there is an increasing demand for more functionality and a smaller footprint with lower losses, faster speed, and longer lifetime.

Full Video Transcript

[00:08:54] I'm Srabanti Chowdhury and I'm an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering. I lead the Stanford Wide-Bandgap Lab (https://wbglab.stanford.edu/) where, with an outstanding group of my students and postdocs, we try to make electronics more efficient. Our vertically integrated lab allows us to work on exciting new materials and we explore from the very atom to the applications.

The other core area of our research is gallium nitrate. Gallium nitrate made the white LED possible. Now it can do some other magic by adding more power efficiency.

So we are particularly looking into heterogenously integrated gallium nitrate to add that extra boost in power efficiency to existing chips. And that we can do even better with our diamond integrated thermal management technique.

[01:00:03] Our mission is to save energy with more efficient electronics. What we get to do in our lab every day is tweak the physics, build technologies, and make these electronics more and more efficient. This is highly addictive!

Some of our projects that we are working on includes making a diamond photoconducting switch. This is a classic example where we see physics in action. It has a realistic end application; for example we can use this in ultra fast grids to trigger a signal, but if you look at the science, you would see that we're working on very fundamental concepts like donors and acceptors and see how they can be excited with light.

We try to use our own devices into circuits and learn from them. So for example you can try out a vertical Gan device in an avalanche circuit and measure the avalanche energy out of it. So this is closing the loop; or in other words, how I define a vertically integrated lab would look like. That means we can make our own materials, we can fabricate the devices at Stanford, and then we apply those in circuits, and learn from those results, and feed it back into the physics, and the materials development! How exciting is that?!

[02:28:01] So what's our plan for the future? We like to solve problems and make stuff work. This makes our heads full of ideas and hands busy experimenting! We are looking into finding exciting new physics, applying them to technologies. We are busy creating new platforms for a more energy efficient future, whether it's grid, or silicon chip, or space electronics – you name it! [Music]