YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Vamsi Borra, a professor of electrical engineering at Youngstown State University, was invited to present his current research project at the recent Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference in Salt Lake City. The conference is hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Borra recently was named a senior member of IEEE.

The conference is considered the largest coalition of electrical engineers in the world. The IEEE consists of more than 460,000 members across 190 different countries. Only a very select few are given the honor of presenting their current research topic. “I felt very honored to speak in front of such a respected group of professionals in my field,” Borra says.

With collaborators from the Ohio State University and the University of Toledo, Borra and his team have been working on a concept called threshold switching, which is a newly proposed way to expedite and reduce the cost of creating VIAs, or the electrical connection between the metal layers on circuit boards.

“Making stacks of VIAs is a very expensive and time-consuming process. …So, our goal is to make this a more cost-effective and less complex process,” he says.

“The other professors and I have proven ourselves through our strong backgrounds in the electrostatic field and threshold switching…we have solid experimental research that backs our theoretical model, and I think that’s a big part of why we were invited,” Borra explains.

When asked what this honor means to him, he says it felt great to represent YSU on such a big stage.

“YSU is small. Yet people from all over the world came and said, ‘Oh, that is pretty cool!’ We don’t need anyone’s approval, but we are doing something that’s catching the attention of the big people in the industry, and that means a lot to us,” he says.