13 Oct With DARPA Young Faculty Award, Jacobberger will develop industry-ready diamond semiconductors
Robert Jacobberger, PhD – UW Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Robert Jacobberger, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has earned a 2025 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award.
The highly competitive DARPA Young Faculty Award program provides funding, mentoring, and industry and national security contacts to researchers in junior faculty positions at academic and non-profit research institutions across the United States. The goal is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians whose long-term research focus has the potential to address national security needs.
Jacobberger, a PhD alumnus of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering who joined the faculty of the College of Engineering in 2022, was selected for a proposal to produce large, thin films of diamond with unprecedented crystalline quality. Jacobberger aims to leverage diamond’s exceptional electronic, thermal and mechanical properties to enable next-generation electronic and quantum technologies.
While its optical properties and hardness make diamond ideal for jewelry and industrial drilling, it also turns out diamond is an ideal semiconductor for high-speed, high-power electronics applications, including next-generation electric vehicles, renewable energy conversion, and radar. That’s because diamond combines highly efficient charge and heat transport with an ultrawide electronic bandgap. And because of diamond’s toughness, it can survive conditions where silicon fails, including the high radiation, temperature, pressure and chemical environments found in space, nuclear reactors and the battlefield.