Foto del docente

Elena Gnani

Associate Professor

Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi"

Academic discipline: ING-INF/01 Electronic Engineering

Head of "Ercole De Castro" Research Centre on Electronic Systems for Information and Communication Technologies

Curriculum vitae

Elena Gnani received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1999 “summa cum laude” and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2003 with a dissertation entitled “Physical models for MOS nanostructures”, both from the University of Bologna. In 2011 she became Research Assistant at the University of Bologna where she is involved in research activities concerning the physics, modeling, design and the characterization of advanced CMOS, beyond-CMOS transistors, quasi ballistic transport in nanoMOSFETs, and carrier injection in non-volatile memory cells. More specifically, she contributed to the development of physical transport models in semiconductor devices and of numerical-analysis techniques, with special emphasis on the study of quantum-confined devices, such as FinFETs, silicon nanowires (NW), carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene nanoribbons (GNR), which represent possible candidates for future generations of the nanoelectronic technology. She has developed new simulation tools for the analysis of quantization effects due to the electron structural, or field-related, lateral confinement, but also for quantum transport effects which must be taken into account for devices with gate lengths of few nanometers, namely band-to-band tunnelling and quasi-ballistic transport, which are commonly neglected by the semi-classical approximation. Moreover, EG devised a new physical model for the investigation of the electronic properties variation related to non-parabolicity effects of the energy dispersion relationship E(k), which take place for nanowire devices with a cross section of few nanometers.

Currently her research activity is on the study of new device concepts able to reduce the power consumption of integrated circuits. Power dissipation is becoming the greatest challenge for today's electronics, as it puts a limit to the maximum clock frequency and, thus in the performances attainable from a single processing unit. This goal can been pursued exploring new types of devices able to to achieve a transition from the OFF state to the ON state more abrupt than the classical limit of 60mV/decade provided by classical devices. This would allow a reduction of the leakage current below threshold and, therefore, of the supply voltage.

She participated in many European and National Projects, and is presently involved in the following international projects:
- European Project “Graphene-based Devices and Circuits for RF Applications (GRADE)” (EU Contract n. FP7-317839).
- European Project “Technology CAD for III-V Semiconductor-based MOSFETs (III-V-MOS)” (EU Contract n. FP7-619326).
- European Project “Energy Efficient Tunnel FET Switches and Circuits (E2SWITCH)” (EU Contract n. FP7-619509).

She has been the principal investigator in the research projects “Futuro in Ricerca” (FIRB) Novel device and circuit concepts for energy-efficient electronics funded by the Italian Ministry of University. The objective of this project is to study device architectures able to outperform the ITRS predictions in terms of off- and on-current, with the aim of reducing the voltage operation of advanced nanoelectronic circuits into sub-0.5V and their stand-by power consumption by one order of magnitude.

Her research activities have been carried out in cooperation with worldwide semiconductor research centers and semiconductor industries, including EPFL di Losanna (Switzerland), Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), CEA-LETI di Grenoble (France), IBM Zurigo, ETHZ Zurigo (Switzerland), Institute of Microelectronics (IME) di Singapore, Infineon Technologies AG, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), IHP - Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (Germany), ST-Microelectronics (France) e Texas Instruments (USA).

She serves as reviewer of many international journals:
- IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
- IEEE Electron Device Letters
- IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology
- Solid State Electronics
- Journal of Applied Physics
- Applied Physics Letters
- Journal of Computational Electronics
- Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
- Physica-E
- International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (COMPEL)

and is part of the Technical Program Committee of:
- European Solid-State Device Conference (ESSDERC)
- IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM)
- Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE)
Joint International EUROSOI Workshop and International Conference on Ultimate Integration on Silicon” (EUROSOI-ULIS)

Publication Report E. Gnani is author or co-author of more than 175 papers published in referred international journals and in proceedings of major international conferences, and of several invited contributions.
- Total number of publications on refereed international journals in the last 10 years: 75 
- Total numer of citations: 1690 
- h-index: 23