Max Shulaker, PhD
Max Shulaker, PhD, is an assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) at MIT, which is an interdepartmental laboratory supporting research and education in micro- and nano- systems, devices, and materials.
During his undergrad years at Stanford University, Max worked with the Carbon Group, led by professors: Subhasish Mitra, Philip Wong, and Zhenan Bao. Max was drawn to the field of nanotechnology as a freshman, and pursued research in this field into his PhD. For grad school, Max was awarded a Hertz Fellowship and decided to stay at Stanford, where he continued to focus in nanosystems – using emerging nanotechnology devices to build large-scale digital circuits. Specifically, Max focused on using fabrication and processing techniques in conjunction with circuit design “tricks” to experimentally realize carbon nanotube-based digital circuits. Specifically, Max researched the use of carbon nanotubes to fabricate carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNFETs) for use in digital circuits. CNFETs can potentially achieve over a magnitude of order benefit in energy-delay product (a common metric of energy efficiency) compared to competing technologies, and can scale smaller than current technologies due to their increased electrostatic control. Due to these improvements, CNFET-based digital circuits are an exciting possibility for future next-generation highly energy-efficient high performance circuits.
Max’s research has been presented at numerous conferences including the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), followed by a subsequent invitation to publish in the special issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC). In addition, he was invited to talk at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference (DATE), the Design Automation Conference (DAC), as well as at the Functionality-Enhanced Device Workshop at EPFL. His work has been featured numerous times in the media such as the New York Times, Discover magazine, as well as the EE Times.