PROJECTS
Prof Jim
A Startup Aiming to Change Education using Artificial Intelligence Technology
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Check out www.profjim.com for more.
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Over the years, I've had the good fortune of working in several areas, including engineering, product management, sales and marketing. This has resulted in 200 issued patents and several products. I like working on projects where value is created and people show urgency.
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Chowbotics
The 1st commercially sold food making robot for cafeterias and restaurants
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Founded Chowbotics and led it as CEO for 5 years. Brought Sally the Robot to market working with a really capable team. Fast Company named Chowbotics one of the world's most innovative companies. The New York times named Chowbotics one of the food trends of 2019. Shipped 100+ robots and did $5M in sales. Raised $20M in venture capital and doubled revenue every quarter in my last 3 quarters as CEO. Chowbotics was acquired by Doordash in 2020.
[1] New York Times: A Robot makes a mean caesar salad, but will it cost jobs? [web][print]
[2] National Restaurant Association: Kitchen Innovation Award Winners for 2019 [link]
[3] Fast Company: The World's Most Innovative Companies for 2019: Robotics [link]
[4] Business Insider: 100 Coolest People in Food and Drink: #62 (not ranked as high as George Clooney (#9), but did better than Prince Charles (#63)!) [link]
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Memory
Resistance-Change Memories
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Our team at Rambus Labs, which I co-managed, developed a brand-new embedded memory technology and test chip in 2 years. We published this work in the #1 semiconductor conference, the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, and later licensed it to Gigadevice, Micron and others. A joint venture in China called Reliance Memory was formed to commercialize this technology as well.
[1] D. C. Sekar, B. Bateman, U. Raghuram, et al., "Technology and Circuit Optimization of Resistive RAM for low power, reproducible operation", IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, 2014. [pdf]
[2] Rambus, Gigadevice, THG Ventures form Reliance Memory to Commercialize RRAM [link]
[3] D. C. Sekar, "2T-1R architecture for Resistive RAM". US Patents #10,622,062, #10,199,098, #10,037,801. [link]
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3 Bits per Cell Flash Memories
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A dozen ideas I invented or co-invented are now used in SanDisk and Toshiba's 3 bits per cell flash memory chips. These are used in several major smartphones. This was my first job out of graduate school. It was special to be able to interact with George Samachisa, who first commercialized flash memory, and Eli Harari, who founded SanDisk.
US Patent #8,000,146 | # 7,764,547 | #7,606,079 | #7,606,072 | #7,606,071 | #7,583,539 | #7,577,031 | #7,551,477 | #7,532,516 | #7,440,327
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3D-ICs
3D Integrated Circuits
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When cities get crowded, they build skyscrapers. Similarly, as we pack billions of transistors into integrated circuits, people want to stack transistors atop each other - and create a 3D integrated circuit. I've made several well-referenced contributions to this field. The semiconductor industry is mature and takes many years to commercialize new technologies though. So it may be a few years before these are used.
A 3D Integrated Circuit Simulator
This work was largely done during my PhD with Prof Jim Meindl at Georgia Tech. I started off my PhD as a curious person who found it hard to focus on one project intensely and had ideas on many topics. Prof Jim helped me learn to focus which has helped me throughout my career.
[1] D. C. Sekar, R. Venkatesan, J. Davis, R. Sarvari, A. Naeemi, A. Joshi, J.D. Meindl, "IntSim: A CAD tool for optimization of multilevel interconnect networks", Proc. ICCAD 2007.
[2] IntSim v2.5, an open source 2D and 3D-IC simulator, released - press release [link]
1st Practical Concepts for 3D Logic Circuits
Over the last 3 decades, several researchers have theoretically analyzed 3D logic circuits where transistors could be densely connected together. However, there was no practical way to do so. Our team at MonolithIC 3D Inc., where I was the Chief Scientist, developed fairly fundamental patents on the technology. Zvi Or-Bach, who was Founder and CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc., contributed more than me to this work. He's a high energy entrepreneur whom I learned a lot from. We were selected as a Finalist of "Best of Semicon West 2011" for pioneering monolithic 3D technology.
[1] D. C. Sekar, Z. Or-Bach, "Monolithic 3D-ICs with single crystal silicon layers", IEEE 3D-IC Conference, 2012 [Invited Paper] (link)
Cooling 3D Integrated Circuits
The biggest challenge with stacking components atop each other is: how do you cool them? We made several important contributions there.
[1] H. Wei, T. Wu, D. Sekar, B. Cronquist, F. Pease and S. Mitra, “Cooling Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuits using Power Delivery Networks,” IEEE Intl. Electron Devices Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Dec. 2012. [joint work with Stanford University]
[2] D. C. Sekar, C. King, B. Dang, M. Bakir, J. Meindl et al., "A 3D-IC technology with Integrated Microchannel Cooling", Prof. IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference, 2008. [Best Student Paper Award (during my PhD studies)] [Story on EETimes] [238 citations]
Contributions to Textbooks on 3D Integrated Circuits
I've contributed to book chapters in two 3D-IC textbooks. You can find them at these links:
[1] Design of 3D Integrated Circuits and Systems [link]
[2] Integrated Interconnect Technologies for 3D Nanoelectronics Systems [link]
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