Dr. Arokia Nathan has been a pioneer in the development and application of thin film transistor (TFT) circuit technologies. In a research career spanning over 30 years, he had a profound impact on the design and development of TFTs and TFT circuit architectures that account for device-circuit interactions which have greatly enabled the realization of commercial organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, high-resolution image sensors, and large area 3D touch sensor systems. His research has resulted in over 600 technical publications in high impact journals and flagship conferences. He also co-authored six books and contributed to 13 book chapters. His inventions have led to over 120 patents awarded and pending, and to the founding/co-founding of five companies: IGNIS Innovation, Inc in 2000, Cambridge Touch Technologies in 2011, and ACXEL Tech Ltd in 2017, Cam-XT Solutions Inc Ltd in 2020, and VISBAN Networks KK in 2022, with a combined venture capital investment in excess of US $100M. His approach to engineering research and development is broad and comprehensive, encompassing fundamental device-science, compact device modeling, process-development and manufacturing, device/circuit architectures and device-circuit interactions for large area, flexible electronics to enable a broad class of new applications. Highlighted below are four major contributions where his work has been most impactful.
As Founder and Chief Technical Officer of IGNIS (2000-2011), he pioneered and directed the development of the company's core technology and the integration of these technologies in display products to compensate for both the drive-TFT and differential ageing of the OLED. IGNIS' technology addresses a technique and system for programming, calibrating and driving a light emitting device display. It is able to measure the OLED and TFT lifetime for subsequent recalibration. This is an achievement crucial for emissive displays that wish to track and measure ageing data from the (red, green, blue) sub-pixels. These sub-pixels are in all products such as high-definition smart TVs, smartphones, tablets, computer monitors, track-pads/screen-pads, cameras, gaming consoles, etc. The IGNIS technology is like an Intel - "inside the product" - and not readily visible to the consumer. The success of his work led to the adoption of his inventions on TFT integration by leading industry OEMs, including LG Display and Samsung, into their product platforms for large organic displays.
Concurrent to his academic position at Cambridge University, where he held the Chair of Photonic Systems and Displays (2011-2018), he founded Cambridge Touch Technologies Ltd and AXCEL Tech Ltd with executive management roles. From 2011-2019, as Chief Technical Officer and Founding Director of Cambridge Touch Technologies, he led the development and commercialization of advanced multi-force interactive touch technology, augmenting the standard capacitive touch sensing in flat panel, and potentially flexible, displays. It yields both location and force in a single signal, which is then separated and conditioned using unique analogue and digital signal processing algorithms. The intrinsic attributes of Arokia Nathan's technological achievement uniquely enables human-machine interaction with wet fingers, in the rain or underwater, with gloved fingers, or under metallic (button-less) screens, all crucial in the next-generation products such as wearables, tablets, smartphones, laptops, consumer appliances, automotive, industrial, medical, and military devices.
As Executive Director of ACXEL Tech from 2016, he was responsible for strategic vision and development of the company's core technology platform. ACXEL's digital microfluidic technology platform enables manipulation of aqueous samples from pico- to micro-litre accurately, to realize various complex lab-on-chip experiments, including single-cell processing for scientific research and experimentation for pharmaceuticals, gene sequencing, health and medical diagnostics. ACXEL's manufacturing operations are located in Guangdong, China where the product currently in development is being designed to replace traditional in vitro diagnostic devices for quantitative-polymerase-chain-reactions and chemiluminescence-immunoassays.
Ever since he first embarked on TFT research twenty-five years ago, Arokia Nathan led the development of compact models for thin film transistors with various channel materials, such as amorphous silicon, transparent conducting oxide semiconductors, and organic semiconductors. He was recognized with BOE Outstanding Contribution Award for TFT Compact Modeling and Circuit Design. His work is undergoing commercialization by Cambridge Enterprise, University of Cambridge via a new spin-off company, Cam-XT Solutions Inc. Ltd., Cambridge, UK.
His recently co-founded VISBAN Networks KK, a Japanese start-up company developing an active transceiver technology based on flat-panel display technology for next generation millimeter wavelength ("mmWave") cellular communication networks. However, mmWave signals are easily blocked and 5/6G networks will require large numbers of transceivers to provide reliable connectivity. VISBAN's low cost "base- station-on-glass" devices utilize MIMO antenna structures to create Mesh networks which can reliably distribute mmWave signals.
In 2006-2011, Arokia Nathan joined the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London as the Sumitomo Chair of Nanotechnology, where he held the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Prior to this, he was at the University of Waterloo, where he held the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Nanoscale Elastic Circuits (2004-2006), the NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship (2002-2004), and the DALSA/NSERC Industrial Research Chair (1997-2002). Here, he created the Giga-to-Nanoelectronics (G2N) Centre for interdisciplinary research in materials and thin film devices. This state-of-the-art processing facility he built is unique to N. America and addresses newly emerging device research for disruptive application areas.
Throughout his career, he has supervised more than 60 PhD and 55 MSc students, and 32 post-doctoral fellows. He has given numerous short courses, workshops, webinars, and summer courses as part of conferences and professional societies including SID Display Week, IEEE IEDM, IEEE EDS, IEEE Sensor Council, IMID, ICDT, MRS Symposia, EU Erasmus, and Jiangsu Province. As part of outreach, he has delivered more than 100 lectures as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer with Electron Devices Society and IEEE Sensor Council. His foremost impact, which has earned him best-teacher and best-supervisor awards, has been in educating a large number of students who currently occupy important research positions in academia and industry world-wide. Equally impressive is his record in graduate supervision, which is marked with distinction. As the supervisor of three winners of the NSERC Doctoral Prize, he is the most successful NSERC-funded mentor in Canada.
In terms of professional service Arokia Nathan has been a lifelong volunteer/leader within IEEE and the global engineering community, with leadership positions in various IEEE Societies (EDS, PHO, SSC) and IEEE Publishing Activities. He is currently the VP of Publications and Products, and a Co-Editor of the 75th Anniversary Celebration Volume of the invention of the transistor. He served on EDS Board of Governors, Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/OSA Journal of Display Technology, Editor of IEEE EDL, IEEE TDMR, Special Editor for Displays and Emerging Technologies in IEEE J-EDS, Technical Committee Chair on Flexible Electronics, and in various conference organizational roles. He has been a Guest Editor of numerous special issues of IEEE journals including Proceedings of the IEEE where he served on the Editorial Board. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Open Journal of Immersive Displays.
Arokia Nathan is a Fellow of the IEEE, SID, and IET, and an advisor to several universities in Europe and Asia. For his service in China, he was presented with the Jiangsu Friendship Award in 2014 and awarded the China 1000 Talent Plan Laureate Award. He served on external advisory boards including ASTAR Singapore, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and many start-up companies. In recognition for his outstanding contributions to TFTs and flexible/foldable electronics, he received the highest award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society – the 2020 J.J. Ebers Award. This award recognizes and honours accomplishments of unusual merit in the field of electron devices.
Based on his broad contributions to fundamental TFT materials and device research, innovations in TFT integration and drivers, entrepreneurship and leadership, and excellence in education and service, Arokia Nathan was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Through his pioneering and sustained research and development over two decades, Dr. Nathan has proven to be an exceptionally prolific and successful contributor to the advancement of TFT technology for displays, medical imaging, and emerging technologies such as flexible and foldable displays and sensor interfaces. His recent results on ultralow power vacuum-deposited and printed TFTs, published recently in a series of papers (Science 363, 2019 and Science 354, 2016) have tremendous implications in terms of their application potential as biosensor interfaces for high-resolution physiological signal detection.
Arokia Nathan and Jun Yu's group is recruiting Junior Faculty, Post-Doctoral Fellows, PhD and MSc students and Research Assistants.
Contact: Professor Yu Email: jun.yu@sdu.edu.cn.
Phone/WeChat: 13708999127.
Title |
Centre for Integration Strategies in Large Area Electronics |
Description of Research Group: |
1. Thin film and large area electronics 2. Flexible and wearable electronics 3. Wireless energy transfer 4. TFT compact modeling and EDA |
Members |
