Chenming Hu

Chenming Hu (Chinese: 胡正明; pinyin: Hú Zhèngmíng; born 12 July 1947^[1]), also known by his English name Calvin Hu, is a Taiwanese-American electronic engineer who specializes in microelectronics. He is TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the electronic engineering and computer science department of the University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers described him as a “microelectronics visionary … whose seminal work on metal-oxide semiconductor MOS reliability and device modeling has had enormous impact on the continued scaling of electronic devices”.^[2]

Chenming Hu
胡正明
Hu in 2023
Born	(1947-07-12) 12 July 1947 (age 77) Beijing, Republic of China
Alma mater	National Taiwan University (BS) University of California, Berkeley (MS, PhD)
Awards	IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal (2009) National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2014) IEEE Medal of Honor (2020)
Scientific career
Fields	Electrical engineering
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Nematic Liquid Crystal Optical Waveguides  (1973)
Doctoral advisor	John Roy Whinnery
Doctoral students	Elyse Rosenbaum
Website	people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~hu/

Early life and education

Hu was born in Beijing on July 12, 1947.^[1] When he was an infant, his family fled to Taiwan during the Great Retreat. He graduated from National Taiwan University in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in electrical engineering, then completed graduate studies in the United States, where he earned a Master of Science (M.S.) in 1970 and his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of California, Berkeley, under professor John Roy Whinnery.^[2] His doctoral dissertation was titled, "Nematic Liquid Crystal Optical Waveguides".^[3]

After receiving his doctorate, Hu became an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Career

Currently professor emeritus, he has been a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1976.^[4]

He has made significant contributions in microelectronics research. He was one of the developers of the FinFET, a multi-gated MOSFET device, and was among the creators of the Berkeley Short-Channel IGFET Model family of MOSFETs.^[2] Since the 1980s, Hu has written extensively on the reliability of the silicon oxide layer in semi-conductors.^[5]

Hu was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to the modeling integration-circuit devices and to the reliability and performance of VLSI systems.

Between 2001 and 2004 Hu was the chief technology officer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He has sat on the board of several companies, including Inphi Corporation, FormFactor, MoSys and SanDisk; he was chairman of the board of Celestry Design Solutions, which he founded.^[4]

Awards and honors

• 1997: elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering^[6]
• 1997: IEEE Jack Morton Award, "for outstanding contributions to semiconductor devices and technology"^[7]
• 2002: IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award (for developing the first international standard transistor model BSIM)^[8]
• 2002: IEEE Paul Rappaport Award^[9]
• 2009: IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal, "for technical contributions to MOS device reliability, scaling of CMOS and compact device modeling"^[10][2][11]
• 2011: Asian American Engineer of the year award,^[12]
• 2011: National Taiwan University Distinguished Alumni Award,^[13]
• 2011: Semiconductor Industry Association Award,^[14]
• 2013: Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA,^[15]
• 2014: National Medal of Technology and Innovation,^[16] given at the White House by Barack Obama in 2016.^[17]
• 2015: SEMI Award for North America, for the BSIM transistor family.^[18]
• 2016: Pan Wen Yuan Award, by the Industrial Technology Research Institute.^[19]
• 2020: IEEE Medal of Honor Award.^[20]