Professor John Robertson FREng FRS

Director of Research, University of Cambridge

John Robertson has undertaken seminal work to develop industrially valuable electronic materials such as HfO2, diamond like carbon and carbon nanotubes. His prediction of the conduction band offset of HfO2 allowed it to replace SiO2 as the gate oxide in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, and so to continue CMOS scaling. His further work on its defects and interfaces with metals allowed its successful implementation.

His work on the deposition process and characterization of diamond-like carbon (DLC) allowed the development of the thinnest and smoothest protective films, and the continued scaling of hard-disk drive memory densities.