Abhineet Agarwal

I am a final year undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, studying electrical engineering, with a bit of condensed matter physics and materials science on the side. My primary interests are in nanofabrication (‘there’s plenty of room at the bottom’) and manufacturing, but I am pretty enthusiastic about anything which involves building.

I am currently working on combining cutting-edge packaging techniques with flexible electronic platforms to make flexible substrates with densely packed embedded chips for readout. This work is at the DESH Group at IIT Bombay and IITBNF as my Master’s thesis where I am working with Matangi Sricharan under Prof. Veeresh Deshpande’s guidance. The work is in collaboration with Prof. Prosenjit Sen’s group at IISc and Prof. Subramaniam Iyer’s group at UCLA.

Besides, I founded HackerFab IITB - India’s first student-led chip fab, where we design and build our own tools from scratch. Swarajya recently wrote about it: Inside HackerFab IITB, India’s First Student-Led Chip Fab.

I also maintain OpenTCAD, an open-source Python framework for semiconductor process and device simulation. It’s an attempt at a scriptable alternative to closed commercial TCAD. It is early and I would welcome contributors, particularly on material parameter files, physics models and worked examples. The code is on GitHub; do reach out if any of it sounds interesting.

You can find some of the stuff I have worked on previously here.

Have always found it difficult to be put in a box. Non-exhaustive list of things I am currently into:

• Interfacing AI with the real world
• Semiconductor Devices and VLSI Technology
• Manufacturing, especially in Tier-2 India
• AI + EDA, and automating process engineering
• The future of personal devices
• Developmental Economics

Besides work, I love music - trained as a vocalist, trying out new sports and backpacking. I also avidly follow and read about politics, history and the technology landscape here in India and the world. You can find my reading list here, and some of my writing here.