Principal Engineer

Location: Santa Clara, California and Stanford University, California

Donald Gardner has been with Intel Corporation since 1991 and is currently a Principal Engineer in Intel Research. He is also is a visiting scientist at Stanford University and received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Donald is the inventor or co-inventor of 60 patents including for inductors using magnetic materials, reflowed copper metallization and structures for interconnections, layered aluminum metal for interconnections, and embedded ground planes. He has received Intel’s highest technical award (Intel Achievement Award) for fundamentally changing technologies by incorporating inductors with magnetic material on CMOS. Donald invented a copper technology and used it to fabricate the first working chip with copper-based interconnections at Intel, then published papers on copper size effects that has been referred to as the first study that showed surface scattering and grain size to be a potential interconnect scaling issue. He also invented an Al alloy/Ti metallization for interconnections as part of his PhD thesis studies that was later widely used by industry in microchips. Donald has published over 140 electrical engineering, materials science and computer science papers in journals and conferences.  He has received three Best Paper and Poster awards at international conferences and well over 500 authors have cited his publications. Donald has had appointments as a visiting research scientist at Hitachi Research Labs in Japan and as an instructor at Stanford University. He enjoys bringing new life to old technologies by blending them with different technologies or recent science and new materials.  His current interests include future microprocessor technology, magnetic materials for inductors, silicon-based optoelectronic devices, nanostructure design and devices, and process integration.

Publications:

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