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FAUSTO FANTINI

Professor of Electronics

Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Dipartimento di Ingegneria "Enzo Ferrari"
Via Vignolese 905
41125 Modena - Italy
tel: +39 059 2056165
fax: +39 059 2056329
email: fausto.fantini@unimore.it

 

Biography

After graduating in Electronics Engineering at the University of Bologna in 1971 and serving in the Army, he began to work for Telettra S.p.A. (now part of the ALCATEL group) in May 1973.
From 1973 to 1978 he was at the Quality and Reliability Department in Vimercate (Milano) and worked on the reliability of semiconductor devices, in particular he established the Failure Analysis Laboratory. The main research fields were the CMOS integrated circuits and the use of plastic packages in high reliability applications.
In 1978 he became also responsible for the liaison with the Academic research, with agreements with the University of Bologna and the Institute LAMEL of the CNR (National Research Council). Research programs were defined for the reliability of VLSI circuits and GaAs MESFETs. As a part of this responsibility, he participated in the preparation of the national research program on semiconductor devices (MADESS 1985-1991).
From 1979 to 1987 he was Head of the Quality and Reliability Department for the Telettra plant in S.Giovanni in Persiceto (Bologna) and here he introduced first the Statistical Process Control and then the Total Quality Management concept, in the mainframe of a company-wide program for quality improvement.
At the same time he kept the responsibility of the research activities in the QR Dept., by working on EPROM reliability with the University of Bologna, on MESFET reliability with the University of Padova, on advanced failure analysis techniques with the LAMEL-CNR and on semiconductor lasers on an internal program for the reliability of optical fiber systems.
In 1986 he became responsible for the Telettra participation to the ESPRIT Project SPECTRE for the development of submicron CMOS, where he studied the electromigration in Aluminium stripes.
From 1987 to 1990 he was an Associate Professor of “Solid-state device technology” at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento S.Anna in Pisa.
In 1990 he became full Professor of “Microelectronics” at the University of Parma, where he stayed until October 1997. Here, he was President of the Council of the “Corso di Laurea” in Electronics Engineering from 1992 to 1996 and, since 1992, he was the Director of the “Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca Materiali e Tecnologie dell’Informazione”, including the Department of Physics, the Department of Information Engineering and the Institute MASPEC of CNR. During these years he has been responsible for European research projects in the mainframe of ESPRIT, HCM, BRITE e SMT, with researches in the field of electromigration, of the development of reliability indicators at the chip level and of high power IGBT reliability. At the same time he worked on National Research Programs in the area of the reliability of heterojunction devices, in particular P-HEMTs and HBTs, based on GaAs and InP compounds.
Since November 1997, he has moved to the University of Modena, now University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Here he was Presindent of the Council of the “Corso di Diploma Universitario” in Information Engineering from 1998 to 2001 and later of the “Corso di Laurea” in Electronics Engineering from 2001 to 2006.
Since 2003 he is the President of the Nucleo di Valutazione (Evaluation Board) of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
The most recent research fields are in the area of the reliability of heterojunction devices, both for optical and high frequency devices, and on the evaluation of the electronic components in severe environments.

Publications >>>> updated list of publications

He has published more than 200 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and was co-author of 5 books on integrated circuits (Patron 1979 e 1987, Zanichelli 1991, Pitagora 2004 all in Italian) and on Quality (Pitagora 2003).

Cooperation

He has been cooperating with many educational and research bodies. For the research in Italy with CNR Institutes LAMEL and MASPEC, the Universities of Bologna, Cagliari, Padova, Pisa and abroad, among other, with IMEC (B), Université de Bordeaux 1 (F), Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse (F), LPCS de Grenoble (F), King’s College London (UK), TH Darmstadt (D), ETH Zurich (CH). He has taken part to research projects with STM in Agrate and Grenoble, Siemens Munich, ALCATEL, Pirelli.
He has given classes on reliability at IMEC, IBM Italia, Pirelli, System.

Committees

From 1997 to 2000, he was a member of the Editorial Board of the “Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics” (Institute of Physics) and from 199x to 200x the Regional Editor for Europe of “Microelectronics Reliability” (Elsevier). Since its foundation he is one of the Editors of the IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability.
He has been a member of Scientific Committees and Session Chairman in a number of International Conferences, including the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium, and was the founder, in 1990, of the corresponding European Conference ESREF (European Symposium on Reliability of Electron devices Failure physics and analysis), where he is still member of the Steering Committee and was General Chairman in the 2002. He has been also in the Steering Committe of WOCSDICE and HETEC.
He has been representing the Italian Space Agency (ASI) in the ESA Component Technology Board.

Research

He has studied since 1973 the different aspects of the reliability of electronic systems and devices. First papers were related with the effects of the plastic packages on the reliability of semiconductor devices; most important results were obtained on the reliability of CMOS ICs. Later he moved to study EPROMs, the stability of the Schottky diodes in ICs (first Italian paper at IRPS),the optocouplers and the influence of the scaling on the reliability. Since 1982 he started to study the reliability of MESFETs, that were manufactured in Telettra, and then the reliability of lasers for telecommunications. He has been studying the phenomenon of electromigration for more than 20 years: an important monography was published in 1991. In the ninentees he has work on the reliability of HEMTs and HBTs, based on GaAs, InP and later GaN, and of IGBT for traction application. More recently he has studied the reliability of pump lasers and high power LEDs.