February 15, 2000

Bowling Green, Ky. -- Research being conducted by a Western Kentucky University graduate could usher in a new era of ultra-fast computing.

Islamshah Amlani, who received his bachelor's degree from WKU in 1994, won first place and $50,000 in the Merrill Lynch Forum's Innovation Grants Competition for his study of quantum-dot cellular automata or QCA.

QCA, the subject of Amlani's doctoral dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, is a revolutionary approach that performs electronic computing without transistors. In QCA, digital bits are stored as positions of single electrons forming a large array that produces the answer to digital computations. "Our society has an inextinguishable hunger for higher computational power and speed," Amlani wrote in his grant proposal.

The Innovation Grants Competition challenges doctoral students to seek recognition for the commercial applications of their research. Contest judges sought to identify proposals that have the potential to effect real change in industries and in the way people live their lives.

QCA has enormous potential for products from supercomputers to laptops and palm computers, Amlani said. "The promise of QCA is embedded in its unique architecture that allows scaling to continue unimpeded down to molecular sizes," he wrote in his proposal.

Amlani, a native of Pakistan, majored in mathematics and physics at WKU. He received the George V. Page Physics Award and was nominated for Phi Kappa Phi National Grant competition in 1994.

"He was an exceptional student," said Dr. Doug Harper, a WKU physics professor who directed Amlani's senior honors project.

"My success at Notre Dame is a testimony of the excellent guidance and training I received at WKU," Amlani said. "The faculty in the department of math and physics did an outstanding job of teaching me the fundamentals that allowed me to successfully switch from physics to electrical engineering. The knowledge I acquired in Dr. Harper's solid state physics course was particularly rewarding."

Amlani's transition from a physics degree to a doctorate in electrical engineering at Notre Dame was not the typical career path, but "I have always felt our department does a really good job of preparing students for graduate school," Dr. Harper said.

Amlani said his interest in the practical applications of physical phenomenon led him to pursue a career in semiconductor and device physics and to pursue his doctorate in electrical engineering.

"I give a lot of credit to WKU for what I have been able to achieve thus far," he said. "If it were not for the annual visit to Argonne National Laboratory, arranged by the Department of Physics at WKU, I would not have met my adviser, Gary H. Bernstein, at Notre Dame."

At Notre Dame, Amlani's research was part of a collaborative effort by the nanodevices group in the electrical engineering department, which developed QCA in 1993. Amlani performed key experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of QCA and has published more than a dozen research papers, including two in the journal Science.

"QCA has several advantages over the conventional transistor-based technology," he said. "If you have an occasion to open your CPU, you know about the huge heat sinks that are mounted on top of the processor to dissipate the heat produced by the chip. As the microelectronic industry continues to scale down the transistor feature sizes, this problem is only going to get worse. Similarly, there are fundamental limits to how many transistors you can place on a chip. On the other hand, QCA offers ultra-high device density, ultra-low power dissipation and ultra-fast computing."

In 1999, Amlani received the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award given to one graduate student in the College of Engineering at Notre Dame.

Amlani and his associates at Notre Dame will continue working on QCA and conducting more experiments. While that work continues, Amlani's career is taking a new direction. He recently accepted a position as a senior engineer with Motorola in Phoenix where he'll work in nanoelectronics research.

Amlani said he will always remember the training and education he received at Western. "WKU is a wonderful institution and all students should be proud of it," he said.

Dr. Harper said classroom and laboratory training at Western give students the experience they need in their careers. Faculty members and others who know Amlani at Western "have been very impressed with what he has been able to achieve," he said.

To read more about Amlani's proposal and the Merrill Lynch Forum Innovative Grants Program, visit the following website: <www.ml.com/woml/forum/index.htm>