Sufi Zafar is a physicist and electrical engineer whose research focuses on semiconductor devices, CMOS, electronic biosensors, charge transport and reliability of nanoscale devices. She is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where she has worked since 2001. She received her PhD in physics from Syracuse University in 1990/1991. Her doctoral research concerned defects and hydrogen-related phenomena in hydrogenated amorphous silicon, and she subsequently pursued research in semiconductor materials and devices.
Research Zafar's early research involved the physics of amorphous semiconductors, including hydrogen-related defects, charge transport and defect equilibration in hydrogenated amorphous silicon. Her work subsequently expanded to semiconductor device physics and the reliability of nanoscale CMOS technologies. A significant part of her research has focused on the electrical degradation and charge-transport mechanisms of high-k dielectric films and SiO2-based dielectric structures used in advanced MOSFET and memory technologies. Her work in this area contributed to the understanding of reliability mechanisms in advanced CMOS devices. From the 2010s onward, Zafar's research increasingly focused on electronic biosensing devices. Her work includes semiconductor-based sensors capable of detecting ions, proteins and other biomolecules, with applications in healthcare, continuous monitoring and environmental sensing. Her research has included bipolar junction transistor (BJT)-based biosensors, field-effect transistor (FET) sensors and CMOS-compatible nanowire devices. IBM Research has reported that these devices have been investigated for applications including continuous health monitoring, wearable technologies, early disease diagnosis and Internet of Things applications. In research on BJT-based biosensors, Zafar and her collaborators demonstrated sensing of pH and single-stranded DNA and investigated the devices' sensitivity and signal-to-noise characteristics. Her work on silicon nanowire FET sensors has also addressed sensor-to-sensor variation and sensing performance, with applications in electronic biosensing and medical diagnostics.
Career Zafar joined IBM Research and has been a research staff member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center since 2001. Her work at IBM has included semiconductor device reliability, advanced CMOS technologies, nanofabrication and electronic biosensing. She has also participated in scientific and professional activities through the American Physical Society and related organizations. She has served in leadership roles within the APS Forum on Industrial & Applied Physics and has been involved in mentoring students, postdoctoral researchers and engineers. Zafar's biosensor research has included technology-transfer and commercialization activities. A 2022 APS presentation noted that research on CMOS-compatible nanowire FET biosensors for early disease diagnosis had been licensed for commercialization.
Awards and recognition Zafar was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007 after nomination by the APS Forum on Industrial & Applied Physics. The citation recognized her contributions to the understanding of electrical degradation and charge-transport mechanisms in high-permittivity and SiO2 dielectric thin films, particularly in connection with advanced CMOS and memory-device applications. In 2021, she received the APS Forum on Industrial & Applied Physics Career Lectureship Award for contributions to semiconductor device-based biosensors with applications in biology, healthcare and the Internet of Things. She was an APS Distinguished Lecturer for 2022. In connection with the lectureship, she presented research on miniaturized electronic biosensors for healthcare, including BJT-based sensors and CMOS-compatible nanowire FET biosensors. Zafar was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2023 for contributions to CMOS-compatible biosensors and high-permittivity field-effect transistor reliability models.
Selected publications Zafar, Sufi; Schiff, E. A. "Hydrogen and defects in amorphous silicon." Physical Review Letters (1991). Zafar, Sufi; et al. "Comparison between Field Effect Transistors and Bipolar Junction Transistors as Transducers in Electrochemical Sensors." Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 41430. Zafar, Sufi; et al. "Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistor Sensors with Minimal Sensor-to-Sensor Variations and Enhanced Sensing Characteristics." ACS Nano (2018).
References
External links Sufi Zafar publications indexed by Google Scholar