Prof John Boland was awarded Intel’s Outstanding Academic Researcher Award today for his work on the behaviour of copper.
The award was presented to Boland, who is an academic in Trinity’s School of Chemistry, by Intel’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr Michael Mayberry.
Boland is the Principal Investigator at the AMBER (Advanced Materials and Bio-Engineering Research) centre, funded by Science Foundation Ireland. AMBER is a hosted in both Trinity’s CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) and the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering. Boland previously served as Dean of Research.
Along with fellow AMBER researchers, Boland published breakthrough research last year based on the behaviour of copper on a nanoscale. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy, the research team observed films of copper grains called copper nanocrystalline films. Each copper grain is around 10-20 nanometres in size.
Boland’s team discovered that the films create valleys and ridges due to grain rotations and, therefore, the material cannot form perfectly flat 2D copper films contrary to previous understanding. Boland’s work has been described as a “breakthrough in materials designs” by the AMBER centre.
Previous work, decades ago, had been completed observing atoms like this using transmission electron microscopy. This offers a bird’s-eye view of the atomic arrangement of a film, giving the appearance of a flat surface. However, the development of technology had allowed Boland to scale the surface of the film. This change in the observation of the grains has led to the “revelation” in Boland’s words, that these copper sheets aren’t flat at all.
This research is vital in understanding the properties and behaviour of copper as a component of computer chip wiring in the devices we use on a daily basis.
