Principal designer of AT&T’s first CMOS microprocessor
James A. “Jim” Cooper Jr. earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 1973. Afterward, he joined the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he served for the next 10 years. At Bell Labs, Cooper designed AT&T's first CMOS microprocessor and developed a time-of-flight technique for investigating high-field transport in silicon inversion layers. In 1983, he joined the faculty of Purdue Engineering, where he became founding director of the Purdue Optoelectronics Research Center and the Jai N. Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and he played a key role in development and direction of Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center. At Purdue, Cooper has focused on device technology in the wide bandgap semiconductor SiC. His group demonstrated several significant advancements, including the first monolithic integrated circuits in SiC (1993), the first planar DMOS power transistors (1996), the first lateral DMOSFETs (1997), and the first self-aligned short-channel DMOSFETs (2003). Cooper holds 18 U.S. patents.