Washington: An Indian-American professor was today named by the White House as the `Solar Champions of Change` in recognition of his immense contribution towards developing alternate source of energy and promoting solar deployment in residential, commercial and industrial sectors.
Rajendra Singh, the D Houser Banks Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the prestigious Clemson University, is among the 10 individuals declared as Solar Champions of Change.
The White House said these individuals are driving policy changes at the local level to expand energy choices for Americans, grow jobs, and add new clean energy to the grid.
With proven success in operations, project/programme R&D, Singh is a leading semiconductor and photovoltaic (PV) expert with over 35 years of industrial and academic experience of photovoltaic and semiconductor industries.
After doing Masters from Meerut University and Bachelors from Agra University, Singh received the PhD from McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, in 1979.
From 1979 to 1980, Singh was a visiting Assistant Professor at both the University Of Waterloo, Canada and at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
In 1980, he joined Energy Conversion Devices, Inc as Senior Research Scientist and worked on amorphous silicon solar cells and thermoelectric devices.
Singh`s research contributions have been primarily in the field of rapid thermal processing, ultra-thin gate dielectrics, low and high-k dielectrics, superconductivity,?? manufacturing of silicon integrated circuits, and solar cells, thermoelectric devices, nanotechnology and local DC electricity.
He was the first one to report the fundamental differences between furnace processing and rapid thermal processing.
His work on rapid thermal processing has led to various new applications, such as novel chemical vapour deposition techniques for the deposition of high- and low-dielectric constant materials and manufacturing of solar cells.
His fundamental work has served as an initial incubator to the rapid thermal processing (RTP) technology and the related semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry is now valued at over one billion dollars per year, as he has discovered several of the concepts used in the commercial RTP tools.
The use of RTP in solar cells manufacturing is mainly due to Singh`s contributions.
His work on solar cells is a part of many recent textbooks on solar cells and has been cited by researchers throughout the world.
