Digh Hisamoto

Biography

Without Digh Hisamoto’s development of the three-dimensional (3D) double-gate metal-oxide-silicon field effect transistor (MOSFET) in 1989, many of today’s advanced logic products likely would not exist. With conventional planar MOSFET scaling becoming more difficult due to challenges including short-channel effects, Hisamoto’s DELTA 3D MOSFET was instrumental in allowing miniaturization to continue. He was the first to recognize that it was possible to solve process issues if the channel was formed in vertical “fin” surfaces. His 3D MOSFET featured strong immunity to short-channel effects, high mobility, and reduced threshold voltage variation. Important to its realization, he demonstrated that his double-gate structure could be fabricated using a conventional self-aligned silicon process. Today’s FinFET advanced logic technologies exhibit most of the principal operating concepts introduced by Hisamoto’s thin-body vertical-channel FET work.

An IEEE Fellow, Hisamoto is senior chief researcher, Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan.