Robert H. Dennard

Robert H. Dennard has been a pioneering figure in the semiconductor industry. His invention of one-transistor dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and contributions to principles of scaling MOS devices brought about far-reaching and fundamental changes in science and technology, impacting a broad range of industries from aviation to telecommunications.

He was granted a patent for DRAM in 1968, and it first began to appear in products in the 1970s. Now used by all computer component and system manufacturers, DRAM requires less power and costs much less than previous magnetic memory and also is less complex and, therefore, denser than the other semiconductor memory cells previously developed. At the time of its development, the largest memory configuration in a computer was 1 MB, requiring several kilowatts of power, while today 1 to 2 GB of DRAM is common, requiring only a few watts of power.

Dr. Dennard’s development of scaling theory has also been a driving force in microelectronics. Along with some researchers, Dr. Dennard developed a concept of MOS transistor and circuit scaling that provides for systematic reduction of MOS integrated circuit dimensions and predicts the benefits of such reduction in improved circuit performance, lower power and greater density. They showed how to design devices and highly integrated circuits at the micrometer level at a time when device fabrication was at much larger dimensions. In the 1980s, he generalized the original work to show how to design devices down to submicrometer dimensions with further improvements in performance and density. The scaling concept led the way from the 5-µm devices of the early 1970s to today’s 0.045-µm devices used in Gigabit memory chips and powerful microprocessors.

Dr. Dennard’s research career spans over 50 years and includes 52 U.S. patents and many awards and recognitions, including the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, the IEEE Edison Medal, the National Medal of Technology and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2009, Dr. Dennard was named recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Prize. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Dennard is an IBM Fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he continues to investigate the limits of scaling and future evolution of microelectronics.