Mr. Kumra was honored for his paper entitled, "Ultra-high performance air-clad interconnects on substrates and silicon interposer: Design, modeling, and fabrication." He was the first co-author on the paper, and his coauthors were Azad Naeemi, his Ph.D. advisor who is an assistant professor in ECE, and collaborators from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech and from the School of ECE at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

With recent advances in VLSI leading to very high on-chip computational capacity, chip-to-chip communication through conventional interconnects with their limited bandwidth and high power consumption have become a major bottleneck. This paper tries to theoretically analyze and optimize novel air-clad interconnect structures developed at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Tech and University of Florida. Analytical models developed facilitate a quick and thorough design space exploration and also help quantify the improvement in aggregate bandwidth and power dissipation.