Professor Kaustav Banerjee from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has been named winner of the 2011 international research award by the Electrostatic Discharge Association (ESDA) - following his visionary proposal to investigate the electro-thermal behavior of graphene electronics. The award includes a cash prize of $10,000.
Intel reports that they have already carried out some high-current measurements on the graphene devices prepared by Professor Banerjee's team and were amazed at the current carrying capacity of a monolayer or bilayer of carbon atoms.
Electrostatic Discharge (or ESD) is a major reliability issue in the electronics industry, being the single largest cause of all integrated circuit failures and it causes an estimated annual loss of millions of dollars.