4/8/2026
Ram Krishna, a PhD student from the electrical and computer engineering department within The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, received a prestigious fellowship from IEEE. He was chosen as the sole recipient of candidates from all over the world.
Ram Krishna, a Ph.D. student of electrical and computer engineering professor Elyse Rosenbaum, received the Electronics Packaging Society Fellowship, a prestigious award given to one outstanding Ph.D. student in the world, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This fellowship relates directly to his work in electronic packaging for chiplet-based systems.
“If you have a large chip, even a single defect can make the entire die unusable, increasing overall cost.”
Ram Krishna
Chiplets are smaller building blocks of a larger chip that are integrated together within an electronic package. They are preferred because large monolithic chips are more expensive and less flexible. “If you have a large chip, even a single defect can make the entire die unusable, increasing overall cost,” Krishna said. By breaking designs into smaller chiplets, defects affect only a small portion of the system, improving yield and reducing cost.
Krishna’s research focuses on how chiplets are placed and interconnected within a package. “I study how to design the package so that signal integrity meets the required specifications, ensuring data sent by one chiplet can be reliably received by another,” he said. In addition to enabling robust data transfer, he also works on power delivery, designing interconnects to ensure stable voltage reaches each chiplet.
Krishna hopes to use his experience to advance the field of heterogeneous integration. He aims to build a fabless packaging company that empowers startups. “I want to enable better packaging solutions that give smaller chip designers access to tools and infrastructure to build their own systems and compete with larger, established companies,” Krishna said.
Krishna's dedication shows both in and out of the laboratory. He has a blue belt in jiu-jitsu and said his training has helped him build perseverance and perspective. "It's extremely difficult, but I think jiu-jitsu has helped me a lot in building my attitude," he said. "Tough things are always there, but if you keep on persevering, you can solve any problem." When he is stuck on a problem in the laboratory, he said he has more clarity by the end of his training session.
Krishna's journey from the laboratory to the jiu-jitsu mat reflects a singular, unifying philosophy: persistence and precision are the foundations of progress. Whether he is designing packaging systems for the next generation of chiplets or working through a difficult technique on the mat, Krishna approaches every challenge with the same relentless dedication. With a prestigious global fellowship behind him and ambitions to reshape the semiconductor industry, Krishna is poised to leave a lasting mark — not just on electronic packaging, but on the community of innovators and entrepreneurs he hopes to empower along the way.
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Elyse Rosenbaum is the Melvin and Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.