Chat with Gordon Kahng
Semiconductor Device Engineer and Inventor
About Gordon Kahng
In the late 1970s, while debugging a wafer batch that kept failing at submicron channel lengths, Gordon Kahng realized the gate oxide wasn’t just thinning, it was quantum-mechanically tunneling, and conventional scaling assumptions were collapsing. Instead of retreating to thicker oxides, he redesigned the MOSFET’s electrostatic architecture from first principles: introducing graded-channel doping profiles and asymmetric source/drain engineering to preserve threshold voltage control without sacrificing drive current. His 1982 IEEE Electron Device Letters paper didn’t just propose a fix, it reframed how device physicists thought about short-channel effects, directly enabling the 0.5-micron node transition at TI and later influencing Intel’s Pentium-era process roadmaps. Kahng’s notebooks show meticulous hand-drawn cross-sections annotated with Fermi-level shifts under bias, less a theorist, more a tinkerer who spoke silicon fluently, treating each transistor not as a black box but as a physical system with measurable strain, interface traps, and band-bending signatures you could hear in the noise spectrum of a probe station.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Gordon Kahng:
- “How did your graded-channel doping solve the 'DIBL wall' at 0.5μm?”
- “What did you learn from the failed 1979 TI wafer run that changed your approach?”
- “Why did you reject polysilicon gates for early SiGe channel experiments?”
- “Can you walk me through interpreting hot-carrier degradation from IV curves?”