Trevor Thornton

Trevor Professor Thornton is currently a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He has published more than 150 journal and conference papers and has seven issued patents. He is the founder of RF Micropower, an SBIR-funded company that is commercializing highly efficient RF and power management integrated circuits based on SOI MESFETs, a patented CMOS-compatible transistor technology. His research interests include silicon-on-insulator MESFETs, electronics for extreme environments, electron transport in nanostructures, and bio-molecular sensors. Prior to ASU, Trevor Thornton has held post-doctoral appointments at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge (1986-88) and Bell Communications Research in New Jersey (1988-1990). In 1990, he took up a lectureship in the Electrical Engineering Dept. of Imperial College in London and was promoted to Reader in 1996. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the ASU Electrical Engineering Dept. From 1991-1998 he worked as a consultant for the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory and was a visiting professor at the NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Tokyo in 1990. In 2002, he was a summer faculty fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratories, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM. He is currently the director of the Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest. The NCI-SW is the southwest regional node of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure supported by the National Science Foundation.

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Optical and X-Ray Characterization (Coursera)

Jun 9th 2025
Optical and X-Ray Characterization (Coursera)
Course Auditing
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Optical and X-ray techniques are powerful ways to characterize semiconductor thin films. They can be used to measure film thickness, purity and crystalline quality, and for compositional analysis. Modern techniques are fast, turn-key, and generally non-destructive, allowing for rapid assessment of material properties. This course describes the fundamentals of [...]

Electrical Characterization: Diodes (Coursera)

Jun 9th 2025
Electrical Characterization: Diodes (Coursera)
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Course 2 begins with the definitions of resistivity and sheet resistance of semiconductors and metals and emphasizes the importance of working with the correct units for each. We see how to calculate the sheet resistance of a thin conducting film once we know its resistivity. A method to determine [...]

Electron and Ion Beam Characterization (Coursera)

Jun 9th 2025
Electron and Ion Beam Characterization (Coursera)
Course Auditing
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Electron and ion beams are widely used for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of semiconductor materials and devices. They can be used to image structures with sub-nm resolution and to provide information about elemental composition and dopant concentration. This course describes the fundamentals of electron and ion beam characterization [...]

Fundamentals of Semiconductor Characterization (Coursera)

Jun 9th 2025
Fundamentals of Semiconductor Characterization (Coursera)
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The goal of this course is to review the fundamentals of semiconductor materials, p-n junction diodes, and MOS capacitors. There are many semiconductor technologies based on different material systems, but the most important is complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, or CMOS for short. This course will focus on semiconductor materials and devices [...]

Electrical Characterization: MOSFETs (Coursera)

Jun 9th 2025
Electrical Characterization: MOSFETs (Coursera)
Course Auditing
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MOSFET transistor switches are the workhorse of semiconductor-based electronics. In this course, we begin with MOS capacitors and see how to extract the oxide charge density, which is important for controlling the MOSFET threshold voltage. We then review MOSFET electrical characteristics and see how current-voltage measurements are used to [...]