Featured Faculty Member
Dr. William G. Vandenberghe
Dr. William G. Vandenberghe received his MS degree in electrical engineering and PhD degree in engineering from KU Leuven, Belgium. His PhD research focused on the topic of quantum-transport in tunnel-field effect transistors for future nano-CMOS applications. He performed most of his research at Imec, an international research institute that performs research in the field of nanoelectronics.
In 2010, while completing his PhD, he performed a three-month internship in the group of Dr. Max Fischetti in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UT Dallas. After completing his PhD in Belgium in 2012, he joined Fischetti’s group as a research associate and was promoted to research scientist in 2014. In 2016, he became a tenure-track assistant professor, then was promoted to associate professor in 2021.
For his PhD research, Vandenberghe received the 2014 KU Leuven research council award, and he is the recipient of a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Young Investigator Award. He is the author of a Springer Graduate Texts in Physics and has authored or co-authored 134 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He was the general chair of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Simulation of Semiconductor Processes and Devices (SISPAD) held in Dallas, TX in 2021 and the general chair of the 53rd IEEE Semiconductor Interface Specialists Conference (SISC) held in San Diego, CA in 2022. He is an associate editor of the journal of computational electronics, and a member of the IEEE Technology Computer Aided Design Committee. His research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Texas Instruments Inc., Intel Corp. and TSMC.
Vandenberghe recently received a grant from DARPA for a research project entitled “Phononic Traveling Wave Parametric Amplification using Heterostructures of Highly Nonlinear Materials” with a team from Virginia Tech, Clemson University and UT Dallas. Traveling wave parametric amplifiers (TWPAs) will be critical to enable the efficient detection of quantum information carried in future quantum computation technologies. Vandenberghe’s contribution to the project will be to predict important materials properties that are relevant for TWPAs starting from first principles, in collaboration with the other team members, improved materials for TWPA will be identified and ultimately fabricated.