Compound Semiconductor Week 2025 announces Professor Srabanti Chowdhury (UCSB Alumnae) as The Quantum Devices Award recipient

2025 CSW Award Recipient

Prof. Srabanti Chowdhury

Stanford University, USA

For pioneering contributions to engineered thermal interfaces that break the phonon mismatch diffusion limit between Diamond and semiconductors and
to vertical power devices in GaN.

Srabanti Chowdhury received her M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2010) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral research led to the development and first demonstration of vertical GaN-based transistors (CAVETs) as power switches for power electronics applications. Following her Ph.D., she joined Transphorm (now part of Renesas), then a startup in Goleta, Santa Barbara, where she led the development of the first 900V GaN HEMT- on-Silicon technology, contributing towards its commercialization. She returned to academia in 2013, holding faculty positions at Arizona State University (Jan 2013 – July 2015) and the University of California, Davis (Aug 2015 – Dec 2019), before joining the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in January 2019, where she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She has been a visiting professor at Nagoya University, Japan, since 2021.

Her device research with wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap materials focuses on power and RF electronics applications, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and power density at the device level that can be translated to system-level innovation. She translated the CAVET technology to industry in 2024, after almost 16 years of research. Since 2013, she has expanded her research to diamond materials — both as semiconductors and for thermal management — developing low- temperature growth processes for device integration. Her work on achieving record-low thermal boundary resistance between diamond and with GaN using SiC interlayer, was recognized with the Technical Excellence Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) in 2023. Since 2020, she has broadened her thermal research to include Silicon, demonstrating large benefits through Diamond integration. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, and AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2015; the Young Scientist Award at the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS) in 2016 for her research on CAVETs; and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Physics in 2020.