Indian origin scientist to get Russia’s highest tech award

 B. Jayant Baliga, a US-based Indian-origin scientist, is being awarded Russia’s top technology award in recognition of his work in energy management which brought about <g data-gr-id="17">huge</g> increase in efficiency and major savings.

The award will be presented to Professor Baliga and Shuji Nakamura on Friday by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a ceremony here.  Nakamura, a Nobel Laureate, is being recognised for his work on <g data-gr-id="18">blue</g> light emitting diodes (LEDs). In Russia, the Global Energy Prize is known as the electronics equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Professor Baliga invented the digital switch or the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) while working at General Electrical research & development centre in New York state in the US in 1983. The IGBT switches energy hundreds of thousands of times a second, raising the efficiency of any equipment manifold.

“Every equipment from your refrigerator to lights to motor vehicles has the need to use energy efficiently. If you take away the IGBT today, almost everything will come to a standstill,” Baliga said on the eve of receiving the award.

Scientific American magazine called him among the ‘eight heroes of the semiconductor revolution’, and President Barack Obama awarded him the highest American technology prize last year and he is the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honour, a rare distinction.