Tiwei Wei, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received an ASME Electronic and Photonic Packaging Division (EPPD) Early Career Engineer award, which honors recognize a young engineer with significant technical achievements in the career in the area of electronic and photonic packaging demonstrated through papers, patents, or product development.
This distinction is awarded to individuals who contribute to EPPD activities such as conferences, committees, its Journal of Electronic Packaging, and K-college education.
Wei’s research interests center on addressing the processing, materials, and reliability challenges in next-generation 3D semiconductor technologies. He aims to understand the fundamental thermal, mechanical-stress, and electrical behaviors as chip interconnects scale to sub-micron dimensions, and to develop efficient thermal-conduction materials and advanced convection-cooling solutions that enable future high-density heterogeneous 3D integration.
Supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Wei’s team has demonstrated stress characterization in in-house-developed blind TSV (through-silicon via) structures as small as 1 micrometer using Raman spectroscopy. They have also integrated micro/nanoscale high-thermal-conductivity materials into fine-pitch tin-based microbumps to improve both thermal performance and mechanical reliability in 3D semiconductor devices. In addition, he led a team to secure $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program to develop a confined two-phase microjet cooling solution at the chip/package level, leveraging porous-surface enhancements and phase-separation mechanisms. Together, these innovations aim to enable significantly more efficient thermal management for advanced packaging and 3D integration in future high-performance computing systems.
Prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 2025, Wei worked as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University from 2022 to 2025. He was the post-doctoral research scholar in the NanoHeat lab at Stanford University from 2020 to 2022, working with Professor Kenneth E. Goodson and Adjunct Professor Mehdi Asheghi. He received his Ph.D. degree at the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) and KU Leuven, Belgium in 2020, under the supervision of Professor. Martine Baelmans and Herman Oprins. He joined imec in 2015, starting the Ph.D. research by developing electronic cooling solutions for high-performance systems. Before joining imec, he worked as a staff researcher at Tsinghua University, China and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, from 2011 until 2015, with a focus on advanced microelectronic packaging techniques.