Recommendation letters are available upon request from the following people:
- Dr. Mike Bruce, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), Austin, TX
- Professional scientist at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), with over 16 years of experience, has published over 25 technical papers and 50 patents in the Microelectronics field.
- ...His early papers on "time resolved luminescence" of CMOS IC's showed a much improved way to acquire the signal. Already at that time he was quickly becoming one of the leading researchers in the application of photon (light) emission based diagnostics to semiconductor microelectronics. His research into hot carrier emission and new photo- detectors has helped to make PICA one of the industry's leading debug techniques for ICs...
- ...His presentations were always outstanding. One of his most resent presentations at the IRPS that I chaired this year was particularly enlightening for me as he showed how to measure signal switching time using PICA. Dr. Stellari continues to greatly expand the state-of-the-art in photon emission based diagnostics. His efforts have been recognized through many well deserved awards for best papers at conferences and journal publications...
- ...Dr. Stellari is recognized as one of the main experts at IBM. His sharing of his knowledge has helped us understand and improve our own capabilities. This translates into getting product to market faster and makes us more competitive internationally...
- Dr. Mauro Ciappa, Integrated Systems Laboratory - ETH - Swiss Federal Institute of Tecnology, Zurich, CH
- Prof. Sergio Cova, Department of Electronics and Information - Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
- Full Professor of Electronics and Head of the Electronics Section of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, a Life Fellow of IEEE, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Laser and Electro Optical Society, with more than 30 years of experience and an established track record of over 180 technical papers in microelectronic science and technology.
- ...he was a brilliant student at this University and attended my course on Electronic Instrumentation and Measurements. His results ranked him in the top 1% of all students and he attained a summa-cum-laude graduation in the minimal time foreseen by the curriculum, carrying out a brilliant thesis work...
- ...(during his PhD) Franco Stellari quickly absorbed the know-how developed in our laboratory on detectors and optoelectronic instrumentation and gained a good insight in the problems to be tackled. He soon gave very significant personal contributions in a diversified research activity, which required accurate analysis of physical problems, skillful design of electronic and optical instrumentation and painstaking experimental work. His activity produced publications in international refereed journals and one of the best Ph.D thesis works that I have supervised...
- Dr. R. Aaron Falk, OptoMetrix Inc. , Renton, WA
- President and founder of OptoMetrix Inc.
- ...Anyone with Dr. Stellari's basic scientific credentials should be a valuable addition to our nation's technical community. I can add from personal knowledge and experience that Dr. Stellari has made critical contributions in the area that drives our current computer based economy. I can also vouch for his personal integrity. He would be an asset to any company working in this field, including OptoMetrix...
- Prof. Andrea L. Lacaita, Department of Electronics and Information - Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
- Head of the Microelectronics Lab at Politecnico di Milano, with more than 10 years of experience and an established track record of over 200 published papers.
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- ... I first met Dr. Franca Stellari in Nov. '97, when I selected him among my best students for working on the refinement of the analytical formulas employed in circuit simulators to estimate interconnect capacitances. In his university curriculum Dr. Franco Stellari attended twenty nine courses in Electronics, Physics, Math, and Optoelectronics at our University. He obtained extremely good results, reaching an average score of 29.9/30, ranking him in the top 1% of the students at Politecnico di Milano...
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- ...I was very impressed by his command of both theoretical and experimental techniques. In a very short time (two months) and without prior experience in this area he was able to master the confocal mapping methods and contributing to the characterization of integrated test structures. Dr. Franco Stellari developed new compact formulas for interconnect capacitances in submicron technologies and the major results of his thesis work have been published in IEEE Trans. Electron Dev., 47, 222-231 (2000). Thanks to the wide acceptance of this paper, he became a reviewer of several papers on similar topics submitted to the IEEE Electron Dev. Lett. journal in the following years...
- Dr. William K. Lo, Diagnostics and Characterization Group - Credence Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
- R&D Group Manager at Credence, Design and Characterization Group, with over 10 years of experience in developing specialized failure analysis instruments for semiconductor device manufacturers (Schlumberger, NPTest, and Credence).
- ...Dr. Stellari is an expert on Picosecond Integrated/Imaging Circuit Analysis (PICA) one of the most important tools in an integrated circuit (IC) designer's arsenal. PICA is a technique to passively probe internal transistors in integrated circuit (IC) devices by analyzing the spontaneous time-dependent light emissions from the transistors...
- ...Dr. Stellari has made several valuable contributions to the field including devising a model of the light emission process which allows PICA users to better determine the nature of the faults in their ICs, and making detailed measurements of light emission as a function of IC operating voltage and feature size which allows users and tool manufacturers to predict the useful lifetime of the PICA technique. For tool developers, the former allows us to better demonstrate the value of PICA to new users while the latter gives us an idea of when new tools and techniques may be required and, hence, when and at what level to start investing in their development...
- ...It was immediately apparent to me that he had an exceptional understanding of both the theoretical and practical aspects of his work. He was able to explain the mechanisms leading to low jitter and high dark count rates in his detector and how those parameters affected the performance of the detector when used in a PICA system. In my experience, it is very rare to find people who can understand both...
- Dr. Steven Kasapi, Diagnostics and Characterization Group - Credence Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
- Dr. Modest M. Oprysko, IBM System & Technology Group, Yorktown Heights, NY
- Senior Technical Advisor in IBM's Systems and Technology Group with more than 20 years of experience in Communications and High-Speed Test, confirms Dr. Stellari's exceptional accomplishments and pioneering research in the field of optical emissions based testing and diagnostics of highly integrated circuits.
- ...What makes Dr. Stellari so special and important to IBM is that he possesses the rare combination of deep theoretical skills and understanding of the practical & commercial issues in his field of expertise. These skills are extraordinarily difficult to find...
- ...During the four years he has been with IBM, Dr. Stellari has made outstanding contributions in the field of optical emissions based testing and diagnostics of highly integrated circuits...
- ...Dr. Stellari has established himself as a leading researcher in the field, whose work not only significantly contributes to IBM products but also the competitiveness of the US industry as a whole. Dr. Stellari's outstanding contributions have been recognized by both IBM and the external community...
- Dr. Philippe Perdu, VLSI Failure Analysis Laboratory - French Space Agency (CNES), Thales, France
- Researcher and manager of VLSI Circuits Failure at CNES Laboratories, the French National space Agency, with more than 17 years of experience and an established track record of over 100 technical papers in the fields of defect localization and internal contactless testing of VLSI Circuits.
- ...II first met Dr. Franco Stellari in September 2002 when we attended the 2002 European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices (ESREF) in Rimini, Italy. Dr. Franco Stellari presented a paper entitled "Optical diagnosis of excess IDDQ in low power CMOS circuits". This paper won the Best Paper Award of the conference by clearly demonstrating that the PICA technique could be extended to use Off-State Leakage current to diagnose failures in advanced CMOS chips. This work was very important, not only because he proved the ability to use PICA for this kind of challenging problems, but also because this work drastically reduced the time to market delay for the IBM product...
- I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Franco Stellari once again in November 2002 when we attended the 2002 ISTFA in Phoenix, AZ. Dr. Franco Stellari presented a paper entitled "Circuit voltage probe based on time- integrated measurements of optical emission from leakage current". In this paper he showed for the first time that internal Vdd levels can be probed inside ICs by means of the PICA technique. At this occasion, Dr. Franco Stellari demonstrated through the content of this publication and through his meaningful and precise answers to the attendee's questions a unique ability to merge his high scientific knowledge with VLSI circuits manufacturer challenges.
- I met Dr. Franco Stellari again in October 2003 when we attended the 2003 ESREF at Acachon, France. He had 3 papers at the conference and he presented a paper entitled "Latchup Analysis using Emission Microscopy". By this time Dr. Franco Stellari was the reference IBM person for the collaborations between CNES and IBM. In this occasion various meeting were held to discuss research collaboration and strategies. Moreover Dr. Franco Stellari organized the evaluation of a silicon APD detector manufactured by PoliMi at the CNES research center.......
- I have known Dr. Franco Stellari for three years and I have closely followed his work on Time Resolved Emission since his first paper. Driven by innovative and productive research effort, Dr. Franco Stellari has been well and deeply involved in the field of internal contactless testing of VLSI. He exhibits a solid understanding in all the field related to dynamic photo-emission He is definitely a top-rated researcher. Dr. Franco Stellari has established a worldwide reputation on Time Resolved Emission and its applications. In my opinion, Dr. Franco Stellari's work in this aspect can be classified as research with top quality in the world. His papers are becoming more and more a reference for everybody who is dealing with dynamic emission microscopy...
- Dr. Peilin Song, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
- Dr. Loris Vendrame, Central R&D - STMicroelectronics, Agrate Brianza, Italy
- Research and Development Staff Member at STMicroelectronics responsible for back-end and analogue characterization of stand-alone and embedded Non-Volatile Memory technologies.
- ...I enjoyed his ability to struggle and to solve all the experimental difficulties that were arising while managing the tests. Moreover I was impressed by both his deep theoretical knowledge (not common in researcher deeply involved in experimental tools) and by his flexibility to stay longer than the normal working time to allow myself to share part of the day between STM and Politecnico...
- Prof. Franco Zappa, Department of Electronics and Information - Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
- Associate Professor of Electronics at Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, with more than 10 year experience, more than 80 international papers and several patents; and co-founder of Micro Photon Devices, spin-off company specialized in the development and production of detection modules for single-photon counting and timing.
- ...I noticed his enthusiastic push devoted to actively pursuing the research goals...
- ...I very much appreciated his skills in conceiving research activities, arranging experiments, and educe analytical modelings from lucid interpretations of results. Indeed he is a very enthusiastic and motivated researcher...
- ...Franco has a bright natural attitude, is a good worker, and has very smart personality, easy to get along and collaborate with. It is on the basis of all the above that I strongly recommend the candidate as a scientist of World class experience and ability who has and will continue to make excellent contributions to research in microelectronics and to the development of advanced instrumentations...
- Prof. Tian Xia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering - University of Vermont, Vermont, VT
- Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Vermont, a member of IEEE and Sigma Xi Honor Society, with more than 10 years of experience in the field of Electronic Engineering, specifically related to test challenges in high-speed mixed signal and RF circuits.
- ...I was able to appreciate his deep understanding of both device physics and circuit layout, as well as his lab skills with instrumentation and data analysis software. Dr. Franco Stellari was also very effective in applying his research to tackle real problems arising with novel IBM chips, drastically reducing the time to market delay for the IBM product...
- ...I have known Dr. Franco Stellari for four years; I have closely worked with him on several occasions and followed his work on new and advanced techniques for testing VLSI chips. He has a solid understanding of device physics, CMOS circuits and time-resolved optical emission that he combines with his instrument and software skills to effectively and successfully develop new testing techniques for IBM microprocessor chips...