Her research has added to the ITRS roadmap of materials and processes for advanced semiconductor technologies regarding devices, interconnects, and packaging.
She received her Ph.D. degree in Materials and Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2004, under the supervision of Karen Maex.
[8] Afterwards, she spent one year in Japan, where she was appointed Guest Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Kashiwa Campus, to study novel plasma processes.
In 2010, she moved to USA and accepted an industrial position at Globalfoundries as a Manager of Customer Packaging Technology and directed the Chip-Package Interaction strategy for the company.
[11] In 2020, she was appointed as Chief Investigator for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems.
[12] Iacopi’s notable research areas include Nanoelectronics, Semiconductors, 2D Materials, Nanophotonics and Energy Storage.
In 1999, Iacopi started working at one of the largest independent R&D centers for semiconductors (IMEC) and focused on ultra-low-k/Highly porous dielectrics for on-chip interconnects.
Her main contribution has been the identification of indium as potential replacement for gold in the seeded nanowire growth by the vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) method.
She bases her research on the fact that the growth structure of nanowires change considerably when the size is in tens of nanometers.
[17] In early 2010s, Iacopi worked on the demonstration that cold plasmas can be an effective solution to slow down the diffusion of reactive species into porous media.
[18] While working at Griffith University, Iacopi invented a direct and selective process for the wafer-scale synthesis of graphene on silicon, with applications in integrated micro technologies, including nanophotonics, bio-compatible sensing, and energy storage.
This research points to the replacing conductive metal films in MEMS and NEMS devices with the carbon-nickel alloy method.