Latest ECE News

ECE Researchers win Best Paper Award

Dimitris Kaseridis, Jeff Stuecheli and Lizy John from the Laboratory for Computer Architecture (LCA) won the Best Paper Award at the 38th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), 2009, for their paper entitled “Bank-aware Dynamic Cache Partitioning for Multicore Architectures”. This conference was held in Vienna, Austria in September 2009.

The International Conference on Parallel Processing provides a forum for engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government to present their latest research findings in any aspects of distributed and parallel computing.

Professors Seth Bank and Mikhail Belkin were announced among the winners of the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program, receiving almost $1.2 million in grants. The program awards approximately $14.6 million in grants to 38 scientists and engineers who submitted winning research proposals. Over 200 proposals were submitted this year.

Dr. Seth R. Bank received his award for “work on manipulating the interfacial electrical and optical properties of dissimilar materials with metallic nanostructures.” Dr. Mikhail A. Belkin won his award for investigating “tunable quantum electronic metamaterials for mid-infrared range.” More information on the award can be found here.

Professor Seth Bank has also won the Young Scientist Award at the 36th International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors. This award has been given out since 1986 to recognize “technical achievements in the field of compound semiconductors by a scientist under the age of forty.” Prof. Bank’s research is centered on molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of dilute-nitride semiconductors (e.g. GaInNAsSb), metal/semiconductor nanocomposites (e.g. ErAs nanoparticles in GaAs), carbon nanostructures (e.g. graphene) and their application to silicon-based lasers, mid-IR lasers, THz generation and sensing, and high-speed transistors. A list of previous recipients The Young Scientist Award can be found here.

UT ECE Students Attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2009

UT-ECE’s Professors Sanjay Banerjee, Frank Register, and Emanuel Tutuc along with Prof. Allan MacDonald, UT Physics Department, and ECE graduate student Dharmendar Reddy designed a novel graphene-based BiSFET device that could revolutionize the chip design industry. This device is discussed in more detail in a recent IEEE Spectrum article.

“The BiSFET, described by Sanjay Banerjee and Leonard Franklin Register and their colleagues at UT Austin, is in the earliest research phase but offers tremendous potential. The BiSFET could substitute for a MOSFET transistor in logic and memory applications. Like a MOSFET transistor, it can switch and it can amplify. Where the BiSFET stands alone, however, is in its phenomenal power parsimony: It needs only one-hundredth to one-thousandth the power of a standard MOSFET, mainly because it would switch at much lower voltages than a MOSFET.”

Jong Yeon Park, ECE Doctoral Student, received a 2009 Coventor & The Micro and Nanotechnology Commercialization Education Foundation (MANCEF) Scholarship Awards. He is one of only three international recipients.

Jong Yeon supervised by Professor Dean P. Neikirk. His award winning proposal: “MEMS Actuator Stacked Microbolometer Array for Multispectral Infrared Detection” focuses on design of novel micro-actuators that would allow dynamic tuning of a stacked multispectral infrared focal plane array. This is highly desirable in advanced IR imaging systems and especially beneficial for defense and commercial applications such as, vehicle night vision, medical thermal imaging and diagnostics, missile guidance and defense, surveillance, nondestructive detection and remote sensing.

Coventor, Inc. headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, provides software tools for developing micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidics and semiconductor process applications. MANCEF is an organization promoting the commercialization of emerging technologies.

More...

UT-ECE professor Gustavo de Veciana has been awarded two grants by the National Science Foundation:

A $400K grant for a project entitled "Dynamic coupling and flow-level performance in data networks," and, in conjunction with Professor George Kesidis from Penn State, a $300K grant for a project entitled "Supporting unstructured peer-to-peer social networking."

The first project aims to develop new tools for analysis and prediction of data traffic performance on communication networks. A better understanding performance coupling among dynamic traffic flows is critical in moving toward a disciplined approach to protocol and network design.

The second project focuses on building peer-to-peer networking infrastructure that can adapt to outcomes of application transactions while addressing privacy concerns.

Professor John Goodenough, who developed materials critical to the development of lightweight and rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, ushering in the wireless revolution, has been awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the most distinguished science and technology honors given by the White House.

Goodenough identified and developed the cathode materials for the lithium-ion rechargeable battery that is ubiquitous in today's portable electronic devices. This cathode material for power batteries has proven to be inexpensive, environmentally friendly, safe, sustainable and capable of thousands of charge cycles with a constant output voltage without a loss of capacity. Batteries incorporating his cathode materials are used worldwide for cell phones and other portable wireless devices, power tools, hybrid automobiles, small all-electric vehicles, as well as increasingly for electrical energy storage for alternative energy, such as wind and solar power. As this technology continues to develop, it can be expected to have an enormous impact on the U.S. economy and the environment by helping to reduce carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions.

UT-ECE professors Ali Yilmaz and John Pearce and their colleagues Professors Leszek Demkowicz and Robert van de Geijn at ICES and Dr. Victor Eijkhout at TACC have received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “High-fidelity simulation of bioelectromagnetic (BIOEM) effects on the human body with petascale computers”.

The interdisciplinary team of researchers will attempt to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in BIOEM simulation by developing reliable, high-accuracy, and high-resolution finite- and boundary-element simulators that can effectively utilize petascale computational resources. The project aims to accurately model wave interactions with the human body at resolutions never before attempted, to quantify the heating effect of wireless devices on the human body and the electromagnetic effect of the human body on device performance, and to demonstrate that results from these simulations can be used to design safer and more efficient devices.

Ph.D. student, Felix Gutierrez, has been named a Marconi Young Scholar. He is one of only five international recipients. The Marconi Society, an organization devoted to recognizing and encouraging scientific contributions in the field of communications science and the internet, recognized Gutierrez for his outstanding work in the field of antenna design and analog circuit design. 

Gutierrez, supervised by Professor Ted Rappaport, is a member of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG). His research merges the fields of electromagnetics, circuit design, and communications to create revolutionary high-speed wireless communication devices. These wireless devices should achieve data rates far surpassing today's current technology by orders of magnitude and rival wired devices in terms of cost, power, and speed.

Gutierrez will receive his award at the Marconi Society Award Dinner in Bologna, Italy, on October 9, 2009. 

From Department Chair Tony Ambler

Welcome back! And to those of you joining us, Welcome! We look forward to another year of exciting research, inspiring instruction, and service to our community.

Junior faculty have been distinguishing themselves nationally with 5 new highly competitive CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation and a Presidential Early Career Award.

• Christine Julien - Opportunistic Middleware for Resource Constrained Delay Tolerant Networks seeks to improve communication networks used to enable Internet in remote areas, mobile search, and rescue and social networking.
• Sarfraz Khurshid - Scalable and Systematic Test Authoring and Maintenance addresses the primary problems of testing software: high cost and frequent failure to identify crucial bugs.
• Alexis Kwasinski - Highly-available Power Supply through Distributed Generation Technologies: Reliability Analysis Framework Based on Operation Under Critical Conditions focuses on improving electric power supply reliability and resiliency by using direct current microgrids – local, self-contained and relatively small electric grids.
• Emanuel Tutuc - Advanced Silicon-Germanium Nanowire Heterostructures Combining Band Structure Engineering and Modulation Doping works on developing high-speed, low-power electronic devices, and can potentially enable cooler, more energy-efficient, high-performance electronic circuits.
• Haris Vikalo - Modeling, Estimation and Coding for Biosensor Arrays explores new time- and cost-efficient technology with applications in medicine, drug discovery, defense systems and environmental monitoring.

This new spate of awards brings the departmental total to 23 National Science Foundation CAREER awards.

Seth Bank received a 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers to study metal/semiconductor nanocomposites (metallic nanoparticles embedded in a semiconductor). The goal is to use these new materials to produce efficient sources of terahertz radiation for a number of applications in chemical/gas sensing and security.

Undergraduate student affairs supervisor, Sharon Bressette, will receive the NACADA Outstanding Advising Award Winner in the Academic Advising Administrator category at the national conference in San Antonio. There are only 3 winners nation-wide.

Engineering Science Building (ENS) Third Floor Renovation

The newly renovated space in the back half of the third floor will include a large conference room, a new writing lab for 333T, and a 4,500 square foot Virtual-LRC for ECE students. The V-LRC will be a large open study space with individual as well as group study space, boosted WiFi access and plenty of windows to allow natural light to fill the space. The renovation should be complete by mid-October.

Faculty and Staff on the Move

This academic year, we welcome three new professors and two new staff members to the ECE family. Professor Edward Yu accepted the Judson S. Swearingen Regents Chair in Engineering. Dr. Yu's research is in electronic and optical properties of solid-state materials and devices at the nanoscale--including III-V nitride materials and device physics; scanning probe characterization of advanced electronic materials and devices; novel structures for photovoltaic devices; and solid-state nanostructure physics and devices. He will be teaching EE 396K: Semiconductor Heterostructures which covers the theory of electron, magnetic, and electro-optic devices.

Dr. Sujay Sanghavi will join ECE as an Assistant Professor. His research lies at the intersection of two fields: networking, and statistical machine learning. He is particularly interested in the use of probability and optimization for developing new algorithms in both of these fields. He will be teaching EE 380K: Introduction to System Theory, which will cover linear dynamical systems and differential equations, state space analysis and applications to feedback control, functional analytic methods, realization theory, stability theory, and elements of optimal control.

Dr. Deji Akinwande will begin working as an assistant professor in the spring. He is a co-inventor of a high frequency interconnect, and is a recipient of the Ford Foundation and Sloan pre-doctoral Fellowships and the inaugural DARE fellowship from Stanford University. His Ph.D. research focused on the synthesis (chemistry), properties (device physics), and applications (circuits) of carbon nanotube devices.

The Center for Excellence in Distributed Global Environments (EDGE) hired a new EA. Stephanie Cardenas says she enjoys working at EDGE because of "the exciting challenges it provides as well as the camaraderie between the staff, faculty and students." Suzanne Graves has joined the undergraduate advising team. She has been impressed by "the exceptionally bright students and the dedicated team of advisors at ECE."

Upcoming Events

	Aug 25 - Engineering Gathering Tues, 4:30 - 8:15 PM on ENS lawn (4:30 check in at Hogg Auditorium) FREE dinner then walk over to Gone to Texas
	Aug 28 - ParkFest Fri, 4:30-7 PM on ENS lawn The annual engineering-wide fall kick-off event is an informal opportunity for engineering students, faculty and staff to celebrate the start of the academic year!
	Sept 3 - IEEE First Meeting Thurs, 7 PM, RLM 4.102 Officer elections for ECE's largest student organization!
	Sept 16 - Schlumberger Day Wed, in front of ENS Undergraduate and graduate students get to meet Schlumberger staff and find out why this is a great company.
	Sept 22-23 - Fall Engineering Expo Tues-Wed, Erwin Center Find a coop position, internship, or a real job this annual event at the Erwin Center.
	Sept 22 - Cirrus Logic Day Tues, 3-8 PM, in front of ENS Cirrus Logic brings live music, free food, and the latest technology to UT-ECE.
	Oct 6 - HKN Burger Burn Thurs, noon, in front of ENS HKN begins the new academic year with affordable food.
	Oct 8 - Sun Day Wed, in front of ENS Undergraduate and graduate students get to meet Sun Microsystems staff and check out new Sun products.
	Oct 8 - Tech Area Night Thurs, 7-9 PM, ENS Not sure which tech area is the best fit for you? Faculty explains the different areas (+ FREE pizza)
	Oct 24 - Family Weekend Saturday, 10-11 AM in ENS Parents get a peak at your life via presentations and demonstrations.
	Oct 26-27 - ACISC Mon-Tues, The Commons at Pickle Research Center 4th Annual Austin Conference on Integrated Systems & Circuits for the latest from academia and industry.