Kin (Charles) Cheung (Fed)

Dr. Cheung is a physical scientist in the Advanced Electronics Group in the Nanoscale Device Characterization Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Prior to joining NIST in 2007, Dr. Cheung was an associate professor in Rutgers University. Prior to Rutgers University, Dr. Cheung spent 18 years as a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. Dr. Cheung published over 250 refereed journal and conference papers plus 37 invited papers. In 2000, he wrote and published a monograph titled "Plasma Charging Damage.” He also holds 12 patents. Dr. Cheung taught tutorials in many international conferences. He also served in several committees for these conferences. Dr. Cheung received the Bell Lab President's Gold Award in 1997, and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Symposium on Plasma Process-Induced Damage. He is an IEEE fellow, and an associated editor of the IEEE Transaction on Device and Material Reliability.

Dr. Cheung worked on picosecond optoelectronics and THz spectroscopy in the 1980s. He then became involved in silicon VLSI technologies, from processing to technology integration to reliability. His work on plasma-charging-damage led him to drill deep into the gate oxide degradation and breakdown mechanism. His experience in picosecond optoelectronics enables him to push the limit of ultra-fast electrical characterization of devices and leverage the kinetic to differentiate various degradation mechanisms. While at NIST, Dr. Cheung has pushed electrical measurements to a new level to gain insight on device reliability. He also developed new measurements for important device characteristics when reliable measurement does not exist. Decades of reliability research assists Dr. Cheung in recognizing the importance of sufficient sample size for projecting low level failure rate. As a result, he is developing a massively parallel, wafer-level, long-term reliability testing platform at NIST to address extreme reliability requirements for power devices.