Kenny featured at 24th Soo Distinguished Lecture

Renowned Professor Thomas Kenny was the honored speaker at the Spring 2024 Yunchuan Aisinjioro-Soo Distinguished Lecture, held yesterday at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Kenny is the Richard W. Weiland Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Senior Associate Dean of Engineering for Education and Student Affairs at Stanford University. His lecture was titled “Encapsulated Ultra-stable MEMS for Timing and Inertial Sensing.”

Abstract:  Since the beginning of work on MEMS over 70 years ago, there has been an interest in using MEMS resonators as time references. Despite promising early results, it took decades to address the issues that contribute to frequency drift and instability of MEMS resonators. Ultimately, packaging became the primary limitation, and a novel wafer-scale encapsulation process provided some important improvements. Once packaging enabled basic stability and performance, it was necessary to improve the basic temperature-dependence of the elastic constants of silicon, which is best accomplished by doping. These developments opened the door to ultra stable MEMS resonators for many applications, laid the foundation for commercial success at SiTime, and provides an opportunity to approach timing applications that currently require atomic clocks or access to the GPS time reference signal. This talk will describe the path and key contributions to modern MEMS-based timing products, and opportunities to extend this technology to critical next-generation opportunities in telecommunications, inertial sensors and other applications.

Kenny earned a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022. He currently directs microsensor-based research on resonators, wafer-scale packaging, micro-mechanical sensors, and novel fabrication techniques for micromechanical structures. Kenny was founder and CTO of Cooligy (now a division of Emerson), and founder of SiTime Corporation. He is founder, recent CEO and Board Chair of Applaud Medical, currently developing non-invasive therapies for kidney stones. He has authored or coauthored over 250 scientific papers and is a holder of 50 issued patents, and has been advisor to more than 75 graduated PhD students from Stanford. He teaches classes at Stanford on sensors, robotics and related topics.

The Yunchuan Aisinjioro-Soo Distinguished Lecture was established in 1992 by Professor Shao Lee Soo and his wife, Hermia. Professor and Mrs. Soo sought to perpetuate the memory of his mother, Yunchuan Aisinjioro-Soo (1899-1991). Born Princess Shansji of Aisinjioro, the last Royal House of China, she took the pen name Yunchuan and became an accomplished poet and artist. Throughout the turmoil of revolution and war, she steadfastly believed that the way for the family to serve the people is through the education of its children.