ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: PHYSICS ALUMNUS BEGINS CAREER WORKING ON MORE EFFICIENT MEMORY DEVICES
Min Khanal ’15 graduated with a degree in physics and accepted a position at IM Flash in Lehi, Utah. He
is looking forward to being part of this new endeavor and shares how his degree in physics prepared him
for this opportunity.
“IM Flash is the joint venture of Intel and Micron, which are the world leaders in semiconductor
technology,” said Khanal. “I am very excited to join IM Flash because I will be contributing through a
team that leads in most advanced memory called 3D XPoint (reads as: 3D cross point). By means of this
advanced memory, I hope, I will be helping mankind to move forward and be more efficient. With this
fast and high storage density memory, people can perform their work much faster. It basically fuels the
system to perform 1,000 times faster than current NAND memory.”
These advanced memory devices are measured in nanometers and hold a tremendous amount of data.
This type of technology has rapidly changed.
“The advancement of memory is one of the prime examples of cell phone technology growth,” he
added. “As we know, previous ‘talk-only’ cell phones utilized 4 to 8 Mb of low-power memory. However,
in today’s rapidly evolving cell phone market, the size of the memory devices have shrunk, and storage
density has increased to support a diverse range of applications. Nowadays, cell-phone manufacturers
use memories of several gigabytes for application software and the storage of huge data. On the
other hand, the size of the devices is shrinking continuously, giving less space for the memory
chips.”
How did a degree in physics help Khanal?
“I realized that physics is the key subject that controls almost every aspect of our life,” he added.
“We take engineering as a tool on any technological design, but the foundation of engineering is physics.
I am a technical person, and I enjoy experiments, adding my physics degree on my personal behavior
helped me to be more proficient with insights on the science behind the experiments. So, my degree
in physics well prepared me to understand the foundation of the science behind the technology.”