Ghavam Shahidi

Ghavam G. Shahidi (born 1959) is an Iranian-American electrical engineer and IBM Fellow. He is the director of Silicon Technology at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center. He is best known for his pioneering work in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology since the late 1980s.

Career He studied electrical engineering at MIT, where he wrote a PhD thesis on "velocity overshoot in deeply scaled MOSFETs" (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors), under supervision of Professor Dimitri A. Antoniadis.

A 60nanometer silicon MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) was fabricated by Shahidi with Antoniadis and Henry I. Smith at MIT in 1986. The device was fabricated using X-ray lithography.

Shahidi joined IBM Research in 1989, where he initiated and subsequently led the development of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology at IBM. It was called the SOI Research Program, which he led at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center.

He was a key figure in making SOI CMOS technology a manufacturable reality and enabling the continued miniaturization of microelectronics. Early SOI technology had a number of problems with manufacturing, modeling, circuits, and reliability, and it was not clear that it could offer performance gains over established technologies.

As director of silicon technology at IBM Research, he was researching lithography technology in the early 2000s. In 2004, he announced plans for IBM to commercialize lithography based on light filtered through water, and then X-ray lithography within the next several years. He also announced that his team were investigating 20 new semiconductor materials. He is currently the director of Silicon Technology at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.