SQU academic delivers talk on nanotechnology in electronics

MUSCAT: Prof Afaq Ahmad from Electrical and Computer Engineering of College of Engineering at Sultan Qaboos University delivered keynote and invited speeches at the ‘2017 IEEE International Conference on Infocom Technologies and Unmanned Systems (Trends and Future Directions) (ICTUS’2017)’ held on December 1820, 2017 at International Academic City of Dubai, UAE.

Prof Afaq was not only invited as one of the prominent speakers, but was also selected as one of the members of the core group to brainstorm for ‘Trends and Future Directions’ towards development and design of dependable systems.

Prof Ahmad, who delivered more than ten eminent, invited speeches on platforms of IEEE sponsored Int’l conferences in various countries including USA, India and UAE.

In his talks, Prof Ahmad said that nanotechnology is an exciting forefront in science and engineering having promising future and breakthrough that can change the direction of technological advances in a wide range of applications with opportunities and challenges.

The title of the talk was ‘Challenges for Test and Fault-Tolerance due to Convergence of Electronics, Semiconductor Systems and Computing’ was of much discussion amongst the delegates due to his content and delivery.

Prof Ahmad while his speech emphasised presenting that “The changes which have come cannot be blocked’ but we have to redefine, reorient, redesign, reevaluate and test accordingly. He was referring to ‘nanotechnology’ and said that the technology has enormous future, such a level of the future that none of the technology has ever produced.

He also emphasised on some aspects of the technology, which generates bit controversies. He said that it is up to the world to think seriously about those controversies for the sake of making the world and humanity more sustainable.

Prof Ahmad presented and discussed about the opportunities due to nanofabric, nanoblocks, nanoswitches, nanowires and Carbon Tubes. He emphasised that how CAEN (Chemically-Assembled Electronic Nanotechnology) is taking shape of an alternative to CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor).

He said that the CAEN can achieve a density of as high as more than 10 to the power of 10 (1010) gates per cm2 by using interconnected 2D arrays of nanowires.

The professor enumerated various gifted opportunities by CAN such as configurability, duality and inbuilt inversion, which can be easily exploited for the use of designing Fault-Tolerant systems.

Prof Afaq also discussed about multi-level switching and signalling and highlighted how the technology makes way for one of the greatest opportunity in computing.