ECE News

ECE Senior Wins Best Oral Presentation at the California Alliance  for Minority Participation Symposium

Bokuba Nwengela, a senior at the ECE department of UC Davis was honored with a Special Award for Best Oral Presentation at the CAMP symposium (California Alliance for Minority Participation). This award was given to the best four presentations in each category (Biological Sciences, and Physical/Engineering Sciences). CAMP symposium brings together undergraduates from all eight University of California campuses to present and share their results and experience in their various fields of research. The event is sponsored by the California Alliance for Minority Participation, and is partly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). CAMP encourages under-represented students to participate in research activities while completing a Bachelors Degree. The students are also encouraged to embark on graduate studies.

The 2007 CAMP Symposium took place at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in the University of California, Irvine. A total of ninety-three undergraduate presenters participated in the event, and were judged by twenty-one faculty and research scientists from all eight UC campuses.

Bokuba Nwengela delivered a presentation on novel Nanoscale Transistors made with single molecules. He talked about a recent research study he performed at the Integrated Nanodevices and Systems Research Laboratory (Inano). In this study, he was able to verify the current modulation properties of special organic molecular structures, which are very promising and important to the electronics industry. Their electronic properties make them important to such applications as tunnel junctions with negative differential resistance, molecular transistors, and building blocks for basic memory networks. Furthermore, given their sizes of just a few nanometers, these devices lend themselves to ultra-fast device applications, and can offer high levels of integration.

Bokuba says he learned a lot from the event and was able to network with the faculties who gave him invaluable feedback. It was an exciting experience, and he encourages every undergraduate student to participate not only in such conferences, but in research in general.

September 2006

Professor Qing Zhao receives two new Multi Year NSF Awards

Professor Qing Zhao has received two new multi year NSF awards. One is entitled "Decision Theoretic Approach to Resource Constrained Cyber Infrastructure" and the second one is entitled: "Integrated Approach to Opportunistic Spectrum Access".  She is the only PI on both these awards and these are each a three year grant with the first one at $240K for three years and the second at $230K level for three years. It is extraordinary and exceptional for a young faculty to receive two such grants in the same year from a peer reviewed agency like NSF. Congratulate Professor Qing Zhao.

April 25, 2006

UCD's Professor Bevan M. Baas wins NSF CAREER Award for the Study and Development of High Performance and Energy-Efficient DigitalSignal Processors

Dr. Bevan M. Baas received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his proposal titled, "Processors for the Computation of Future Digital Signal Processing Applications".

The National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Abstract:
Applications requiring significant levels of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) are becoming increasingly commonplace--examples include GPS receivers, Wi-Fi wireless networking, 3D medical imaging, and cell phones. As these applications become increasingly sophisticated and more frequently portable, their performance and power dissipation requirements often exceed the capabilities of modern DSP processors. The goal of this research is to develop novel architectures, circuits, and software for high performance and low power DSP processors that meet the demands of emerging and future DSP applications, and that are also well-suited to future semiconductor fabrication processes. Research results are introduced into both undergraduate and graduate level courses and other investigators are involved in collaborative efforts. Results of this research are expected to enable new embedded, medical, environmental, and consumer applications. 

To achieve project goals, the investigators develop DSP systems with features that are new on several levels. First, easily-scalable programmable building block processors with high performance and high energy efficiency are developed using innovative architectures, granularity, clocking, interconnection, and circuits. Second, efficient
architectures are developed for shared blocks such as large memory arrays and special-purpose DSP processors, as well as methods for effectively integrating these blocks into the programmable DSP array. Third, software tools including a compiler and automatic mapping tools are developed to more easily program the system. Fourth, to demonstrate gains in performance and energy efficiency, the system is implemented in silicon, tested, and characterized.

Professor Saif Islam Receives the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award

Professor M. Saif Islam has been selected to receive the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for the College of Engineering Dean’s Faculty Award Program. This is the highest honor the College of Engineering can bestow upon its faculty. The award plaque and the accompanying certificate will be presented to Prof. Islam at the College of Engineering New Faculty and Dean’s Annual Award Reception that will be schedules in early November, 2006. Recipient of the Dean’s Faculty Award are added to a permanent display board located in the main lobby of the Kemper Hall to honor the achievements of the outstanding faculty members within the College of Engineering.

February 17, 2006

UCD's Professor Rajeevan Amirtharajah Wins NSF 'Early Career' Award to Develop Integrated Circuits for Energy Harvesting Microsystems.

Summary:  Dr. Amirtharajah’s research focuses on powering electronic systems from environmental sources by harvesting energy from solar radiation or mechanical vibration.  The goal is to reduce battery size and volume, decrease system maintenance costs, and increase operating lifetime for portable or wearable electronics or wireless sensors.  Research under the new grant will include the exploration of circuit styles and signal processing architectures for energy harvesting sensors which enable a trade off between system performance and available power.  This work will open new possibilities in long-lifetime sensors for monitoring critical infrastructure, health care, and security applications.
Title: Energy Scalable Signal Processing for Energy Harvesting Microsystems
Abstract:  This CAREER proposal focuses on developing integrated circuits for energy harvesting microsystems.  Advances in digital technology have brought computation out of the machine room and made it nearly ubiquitous.  Integrating computation with sensing and actuation enables new applications in transportation systems, environmental studies, and public safety.  However, battery technology has not kept pace-limiting size, operating lifetime, and raising costs.  Energy harvesting from external sources can enable the next generation of ubiquitous computation, but energy-harvesting microsystems are still in their infancy.  Moreover, the desire for smaller devices and high integration limits the power available from energy harvesting.  Intellectual Merit:  This proposal addresses these issues by developing microarchitectures and circuits for sensor signal processing that are energy efficient, energy scalable, and robust to voltage variations, which characterize energy harvesting transducers.  The approach is to develop computational elements that do not require DC power supplies by using energy recovery and self-timed circuits adapted to energy harvesting operation from AC supplies.  The project culminates in the development of a custom DSP integrated circuit with a target energy efficiency of 10 TeraOps/W, which will demonstrate critical enabling technologies for future energy harvesting microsystems.  Broader Impacts:  To broaden the impact of this work, the project will bring energy scalability ideas into new and revised courses through design projects and laboratory experiments.  The goal is to reintroduce physical constraints into digital design, which is currently dominated by logic synthesis, and link education with the research program.
  The project will involve underrepresented minorities in the proposed research through the NSF California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) program.  The project will contribute to the energy harvesting and low power research community by disseminating methodologies, results, and tools online and through interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and with industry researchers at Motorola and Xilinx, Inc.

January 28, 2006

UCD's Professor M. Saif Islam wins NSF 'Early Career' Award to Study Nanomanufacturing of Nanowire Based Devices and Circuits

Assistant Professor M. Saif Islam was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the National Science Foundation. The Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. His work is titled "Massively Parallel and Manufacturable Self-Assembly Techniques for Interfacing and Integrating Nanowires in Devices and Circuits".
Dr. Islam, while working for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories before joining UC Davis, has developed two novel nano-device integration and mass-production techniques termed 'nano-bridges' and 'nano-colonnades' that are entirely compatible with existing microelectronics fabrication processes. His current research objectives include the development of massively parallel nano-structures synthesis and integration processes for potential applications in bio-chemical sensors and sensor networks, nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, memory and logic devices for future computing.
Research under the new grant will continue the development of new type of devices and circuits that will be formed starting with a single atom. The goal will be to minimize the device size and increase the density of devices in future electronic and photonic systems. Dr. Islam’s bridging techniques will connect the devices to the rest of the world without using expensive and tedious interfacing techniques.
From the abstract:
The research objective of this Faculty Early Career (CAREER) award addresses the long-standing issues of interfacing and interconnecting one-dimensional semiconductor nanowires with devices and circuits and proposes to develop novel mass-manufacturable solutions. The broad goals of this program are to advance our device physics understanding of nanowire-bulk interfaces and to facilitate new practical technologies for design, integration and mass production of nanowire based devices and systems with innovative quantum effects. Despite significant progress in nanowire synthesis and many promising single device demonstrations, applications of nanowires have been stalled by our inability to controllably incorporate them within integrated circuits. Unlike the research-based approach of sequentially connecting electrodes to individual nanowires for device physics studies, this research will employ a novel technique of epitaxial bridging of nanowires between pre-fabricated electrodes for reproducible fabrication of ultra-dense and low-cost device and circuit arrays. Growth conditions, doping techniques and wafer processing methods will be explored to understand and optimize nanowire-bulk connections. The educational objectives of the CAREER program are focused on significantly impacting the research experience of both graduate and undergraduate students at the University of California – Davis and the large numbers of minority students in Oakland public school system. The PI proposes to develop a new nanotechnology course titled “Nanostructured Devices: Physics and Technology” that will serve to introduce and excite undergraduate students about nano-manufacturing and the career opportunities that will be available to them. The PI will develop a program for inseminating knowledge of the advancements in nanotechnology into Bay Area Technology School (BAYTECH), a high school in a predominantly underprivileged and socio-economically impacted neighborhood of downtown Oakland, California.
The proposed research plan will greatly impact the fields of Nanomanufacturing by transitioning nanowires into a reliable technology through the development of cost-effective mass-manufacturing methods with revolutionary new capabilities and performances for wide variety of applications.  The outcome will lead to unprecedented device density, ultimately making the nanowire based devices a commercial reality with a major improvement in the cost/performance ratio. This will facilitate mass-manufacturing of devices for electronic, photonic, energy storage and conversion, advanced light sources, sensing, and biological systems. The research community will also benefit in the near term through the development of a universal “test-bed” for combining conventional microfabrication (bottom-up) and synthetic nanofabrication (top-down) where self-assembled nanostructures mate to pre-fabricated microstructures to test new concepts in quantum devices. 

January 18, 2006

Grant for Ultrafast Optical Communications 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded $9.5 million over three and a half years to UC Davis, MIT and commercial partners to develop new high-speed devices for ultra fast optical communications, imaging and other applications.
“We will be prototyping a compact, optical arbitrary waveform generator capable of communicating at unprecedented bandwidth, potentially 10 thousand times faster than the fastest commercial communications system today,” said co-principal investigator S.J. Ben Yoo, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the UC Davis Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society.
Optical and radio communications devices generate a carrier wave of a specific frequency, for example the transmission frequency of a radio station.  The amount of  information, or bandwidth, carried by the wave can only be a fraction of that frequency.  Optical communications links can carry far more information than radio because light waves have a much higher frequency than radio waves.
The DARPA project aims to investigate how to use and manipulate the high carrier frequencies of mid-infrared light most effectively, Yoo said.
Yoo’s research group will use technology invented at UC Davis to design, build and test thumbnail-sized chips that can potentially encode date at rates up to 100 terahertz, 10 thousand times faster than devices currently available.  The MIT group, led by Professor Erich Ippen, will build devices to generate the high-frequency carrier wave.
Apart from high-speed communications, the technology could also be applied for light-based radar devices or “ladar,” capable of very high resolution scanning; medical imaging; or in devices of synthesizing very rich electronic tones, Yoo said.
The other UC Davis investigators in the project are Jonathan Heritage, Anh-Vu Pham, and Brian Kolner, all professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,  The commercial partners are Inphi Inc. of Westlake Village, Calif., and Multiplex Inc. and Inplane Photonics Inc., both of South Plainfield, N.J.
The new project, which will fund an additional 15 researchers at UC Davis and others at the industrial partners, grew out of another DARPA-funded project on optical communications technology awarded to Yoo and collaborators in 2002.
Additional information:
Optical Switching & Communications Lab
 
Media contact(s):
*Ben Yoo, Electrical and Computer Engineering, (530) 752-7063, yoo@ece.ucdavis.edu
*Andy Fell, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-4533, ahfell@ucdavis.edu