Dr. Subramanian S. Iyer is acknowledged by his peers, as an engineer par excellence, responsible for some of the most outstanding innovations in semiconductor technology in the last two decades.

He has had a long and productive career at IBM, where he is currently Distinguished Engineer. He joined IBM at Yorktown Heights, NY, in 1981, after completing his Ph.D at UCLA. He has continued at IBM ever since, except for a three year stint to found a start-up company.

Dr. Iyer is well-known in the semiconductor technology area as the key person responsible for putting the compound silicon-germanium (SiGe) into the mainstream of semiconductor technology by pioneering work in the areas of SiGe technology, SiGe heterojunction transistors (HBTs), SiGe strained layers and use of SiGe in CMOS technology. Today, SiGe technology is seen as an essential ingredient for scaled CMOS transistors of the next several generations. Most of the important papers and patents in SiGe came from Dr. Iyer’s group at IBM in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Dr. Iyer is personally recognized as the inventor of the SiGe HBT.

Another far-reaching contribution by Dr. Iyer was the development, at IBM, of the Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology in the 1990’s. This is also widely recognized as pioneering work, and the efforts of Dr. Iyer’s group culminated in the world’s first SOI microprocessor chips in the early 2000’s. Both the SiGe and SOI efforts by Dr. Iyer at IBM have resulted in futuristic technologies, which are now starting to be used in advanced semiconductor technology.

Dr. Iyer has received several awards, including two IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, and the prestigious award of Fellow of IEEE in 1995 with the citation, “for contributions to SiGe heterjunction devices”. He has over 150 publications and 30 patents.