Professor Aaron Thean

Professor Aaron Thean is the Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He was previously the Founding Dean of the NUS College of Design and Engineering, and the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition, he holds several technical leadership responsibilities at the University, including the Director of the Singapore Hybrid-Integrated Next-Generation μ-Electronics Centre, Director of the Hybrid Integrated Flexible Electronic Systems research programme, and Co-Director for the A*Star SIMTech-NUS Joint Lab on Hybrid Flexible Electronics. From 2016 to 2018, he also served under the Deputy President of Research and Technology of NUS as the Director of Industry Engagement & Partnerships. In 2018, he was the Director of the Applied Materials-NUS Corporate Laboratory for Advanced Materials.

Prior to NUS, Prof Thean was the Vice President of Logic Technologies at IMEC. Working with semiconductor industry leaders like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, Apple, and Sony, he directed the research and development of next-generation semiconductor technologies and emerging nano-device architectures. There, he managed US$50M annual R&D operations that included material research, process technology, and system  technology co-design. He also brought in new consortium partners like SKHynix, Apple, and Huawei to IMEC. Prior to joining IMEC in 2011, he was with Qualcomm’s CDMA Technologies in San Diego, California. There, he led the Strategic Silicon Technologies Group, working on Qualcomm’s 20nm and 16nm mobile System-On-Chip technologies.

From 2007 to 2009, Prof Thean was the Device Manager at IBM, where he led an eight-company process technology team to develop the 28-nm and 32-nm low-power bulk CMOS technology at IBM East Fishkill, New York, from research to risk production. The technology was transferred successfully to several foundry partners, and became the industry’s first foundry-compatible Gate-First High-k Metal-Gate with novel SiGe channel low-power bulk CMOS technologies. It successfully enabled some of today’s most successful mobile devices by Samsung and Apple. Before IBM, Prof Thean was a senior scientist at Freescale Semiconductor (and Motorola) where he performed research on many novel devices.

Prof Thean graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, USA, where he received his B.Sc. (Highest Honors), MSc, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering (Edmund J. James Scholar). He has published over 400 technical papers and holds more than 50 US patents. Among his notable recognitions, he and his IMEC team received the 2014 Compound Semiconductor Industry Innovation award for their III-V Nanodevice work. He was also recognised for his research contribution to Samsung with the 2013 Samsung Collaboration Award from the Samsung LSI EVP. Prof Thean was also given the 2010 Young Alumni Achievement Award from his alma mater, the University of Illinois, for his contribution to advanced transistor R&D. More recently, Prof Thean was recognised as a Returning Singapore Scientist by Singapore’s National Research Foundation. Active in local and international advanced electronics communities, Prof Thean is an Editor of the IEEE Electron Device Letters and serves on several Scientific Advisory Boards that include the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMART-LEES) and the A*Star Institute of Microelectronics (IME). He is also a Consulting Fellow to the IMEC CEO.