Shayak Banerjee, a Ph.D. candidate being supervised by Professor Michael Orshansky, has won an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. The fellowships are awarded worldwide and are intensely competitive. Only 60 students were awarded this fellowship for 2007-08. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded tuition fees, and a stipend for one nine-month academic year. The fellowship is usually followed by an internship at IBM.

Banerjee will be presenting his paper Electrically Driven Optical Proximity Correction Based on Linear Programming at the 2008 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in November. His research aims at reducing variability in circuit manufacturing by altering the lithography mask to directly compensate for any mismatch in design targets. Reducing variability improves the yield of circuits and is of great benefit for any foundry.