Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Suman Datta won the 2026 IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award. The award is given annually to an individual or a team of up to three people for contributions to solid-state devices and technology. It is named after former Intel CEO Andrew Grove.
Datta received the honor for his contributions to and leadership in high-performance and energy-efficient logic transistor research. His work includes metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors, high-k/metal gate transistors, FinFETs, and non-silicon channel CMOS transistors. These transistors form part of modern microprocessor technology. Advances in mobile, high-performance, and accelerated computing over the last two decades were made possible in part due to Datta’s work in commercial logic transistor technologies.
From 1999 to 2007, Datta worked in the Advanced Transistor Group at Intel Corporation, where he led device research and development for several generations of high-performance logic transistors, including high-k/metal gate, Tri-gate, and strained channel CMOS transistors. He later held professorships at the University of Notre Dame and The Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, his group advanced compound semiconductor-based quantum-well field effect transistors and tunneling field-effect transistors for steep-slope switching below the 60 mV/decade Boltzmann limit.
Datta is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair Professor at Georgia Tech. His current research focuses on the exploration of emerging semiconductor devices and their integration into novel computing architectures to address the physical limits of traditional CMOS scaling. The work centers on system-technology co-optimization, specifically leveraging charge-based memories and monolithic 3D integration to overcome the memory wall in AI and high-performance computing. He is investigating non-volatile ferroelectric transistors and amorphous oxide semiconductor transistors for advanced memory, logic, and power delivery applications.
Datta has published over 500 journal and refereed conference papers and holds more than 187 issued patents related to semiconductor devices. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2013, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2016, and received the 2024 SRC/SIA University Research Award. He will accept the award at the 72nd Annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco at the end of 2026.
