Leaders in their field

Professor Francesca Iacopi

Professor Francesca Iacopi, Head of Discipline, Communications and Electronics, School of Electrical and Data Engineering is recognised for her work on the miniaturisation of electronics. She came to UTS in 2016 with an international background in microelectronics and already the recipient of several awards. She has invented the first platform technology to enable the use of graphene on silicon wafers at the wafer–level, i.e. in a semiconductor manufacturing compatible fashion.

Smart use and management of energy is rapidly becoming one of the most basic requirements for a sustainable future. A fundamental solution to this is designing devices with ultra-low energy consumption, minimising all the parasitic energy losses (electrical, thermal, mechanical) which make devices power-hungry and also less performant. Low energy consumption needs to be complemented with efficient energy storage. Graphene and other 2D materials can enable all of these functionalities.

Graphene has extraordinary material properties; however, most graphene synthesis methods are not compatible with semiconductor technologies. The new synthesis I have developed, which uses silicon carbide on silicon wafers, provides the first realistic possibility of mass production. My research group has pioneered an approach to obtain graphene from sources making enabling the use of silicon in place of extremely expensive silicon carbide wafers, and also the use of conventional micromachining.

Professor Iacopi and her research team work to design nano devices with unprecedentedly low energy consumption and dissipation, complemented by solutions for integrated energy storage, including; Low-power consumption electronics; low-loss plasmonics; low-damping mechanical systems for highly sensitive molecular recognition; and efficient on-chip energy storage.

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