Teaching at the Speed of Semiconductor Research

Some courses in a college curriculum don’t change that much over the course of a decade, let alone year-to-year. For example, ECON 101’s fundamental lessons about supply and demand remain steadfast. Others, however, like ECE 512 (Emerging Nanoelectronic Devices), risk being outdated every year.

In the semiconductor field, breakthroughs move at lightning speed, so the course content is constantly refreshed to keep pace. Taught by Aaron Franklin, the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, ECE 512 gives students an up-to-date look at semiconductor device technologies and the challenges researchers are trying to solve next.

“It is a dive into a very cutting-edge space,” Franklin said. “The goal is to provide students with an understanding of the latest developments in semiconductor technology and enough conceptual mastery to be able to track and understand exploratory work that’s happening and what could come in the future.”

Franklin has taught the class every two years in the spring since arriving at Duke 12 years ago. As an active researcher in semiconductors, Franklin uses the field’s latest innovations to shape each course offering. Papers and talks from the annual International Electron Devices Meeting, one of the discipline’s leading conferences, help him gather new ideas and are used as textbook-level material during the course.

The result is a class that rarely looks the same two times in a row. For Andrew Hibbs, a first-year PhD student in ECE, that immediacy is what makes the course stand out.

“The class moves fast and next year the entire course structure could be changed with how quickly the device landscape is changing,” Hibbs said. “It’s important to have a class like this every year and a professor like Dr. Franklin who is flexible enough to change the course structure on a dime.”

This spring, Franklin taught 64 students in the class, nearly double the number from two years ago. The course brings together a mix of learners uncommon in many classrooms with upperclassmen undergraduates, master’s students and PhD students exploring the topic together.

Students learn about emerging device architectures, how they work, why they may outperform existing devices and what challenges still lay ahead.

“We talk a lot about benchmarking in the class,” Franklin said. “I try to get students to not just understand the technical content of a report on a new device or development but have the ability to contextualize it across the field.”

Victoria Martinez, a junior studying ECE, said one of the draws for the course was the focus on the current state of the industry.

“ECE 512 places a large emphasis on understanding the ongoing research,” Martinez said. “Dr. Franklin has also been very upfront about telling us about the business side of the industry, which has been eye-opening for me.”

To wrap up the semester, students work in small teams of four to dive deeply into a specific nanoelectronic device and present the findings and implications of the device to their peers. This spring, 16 teams presented on emerging devices ranging from 2D transistors to junctionless field-effect transistors and other state-of-the-art architectures.

Martinez is considering a career in semiconductors, and ECE 512 has helped her better understand just how broadly these devices shape daily life and how future advances could change society even further.

“Everything from a microwave, your car, the servers that host a bank’s online website or the thermometer that you use at the doctor’s office all rely on integrated circuits built from billions of transistors,” Martinez said. “In the past 50 years, this field has grown by leaps and bounds, and I would love to be part of its growth in the future.”