Suraj Cheema

Research

Professor Suraj Cheema’s research focuses on addressing grand challenges in energy consumption, storage, and generation through the lens of microelectronics. He explores atomic-scale engineering of electronic materials, particularly ferroelectric heterostructures, to discover new energy-efficient and energy-autonomous technologies for sustainable microelectronics. These ferroelectric materials exhibit unique properties, including the negative capacitance effect, which enhances charge responses beyond traditional limits. This results in unprecedented performance, ranging from ultralow power logic transistors to ultrahigh energy storage capacitors. All breakthrough ferroelectric properties are designed at the atomic-scale in materials already in modern microprocessors to accelerate the lab-to-fab translation of next-generation microelectronics. Professor Cheema’s future work aims to create self-powered intelligent microsystems combining computing, memory, and sensing alongside on-chip energy storage and harvesting, all based on ferroelectric building blocks.

Biography

Professor Cheema earned his bachelor’s degree from the applied physics and applied mathematics department at Columbia University, where he was awarded the Francis Rhodes Prize. He completed his PhD in materials science and engineering and his postdoc in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Interning at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, he successfully integrated his patented negative permittivity ferroelectric material into U.S. defense foundry transistor technology. In July 2024, Professor Cheema joined MIT as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.