ECE News for Spring 2003

EE 345M: Valvano's Embedded and Real-Time Systems Lab or Just Cool Robot Cars?

ECE Adjunct Professors recognized
as Corporate Champions
R. Gary Daniels of Motorola and Howard Neal of Schlumberger recently received the COE's Corporate Champion award. Mr. Daniels, Motorola’s consultant on university relations, attracted financial support for departmental programs as a member of the ECE Visiting Committee. Mr. Neal, vice president of industrial relations at Schlumberger, devotes two thirds of his time to helping ECE develop a strategic plan and cultivating industrial relationships. Both will teach EE 302 in the fall.

Goodenough receives Hocott Research Award
Dr. John B. Goodenough is the 2003 recipient of the Billy and Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award. This award recognizes faculty members whose documented research, while associated with UT Austin, has significantly advanced the engineering profession.

Dr. Goodenough’s development of cathode materials for lightweight, long-lasting, high-energy-density rechargeable lithium-ion batteries made possible the portability of present-day cell phones and laptops. He received the 2000 Japan Prize, the Asian equivalent of the Noble Prize, for this work. In addition, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineers. More...

Top INTEL Researcher Explores the Future of
Unlicensed Wireless
Dr. Kevin Kahn, Director of INTEL's Communications and Interconnect Technology Lab, will become the eighth speaker in the ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series on Friday, May 2nd, 3:00 PM at ACES 2.302. He will provide high level survey of the limitations of today's unlicensed wireless LAN systems, examine the technical and regulatory approaches that will allow us to vastly improve their performance, and discuss some of the research areas being worked on within Intel's labs. Topics will include ultra wideband radio systems, smart antennas, cognitive radios, and emerging directions in wireless regulation.

Senior Lab Open House

ECEntury Banquet Honors Our Past and
Looks to the Future
The Electrical & Computer Engineering department celebrated its 100 Year Anniversary with historical presentations as well as a review of current technology. Over 40 posters documented the innovative projects currently underway in the ECE in a pre-banquet reception. At the banquet, Jim Nicar of the Texas Exes, Dr. David Beer, Dean Streetman, and a roundtable of senior faculty explained the department's traditions and heritage while UT President Larry Faulkner and Chairman Tony Ambler discussed their visions for the future. Graduating seniors were also honored as were Drs. John Cogdell and Francis Bostick for their long service to the department.

Dean Neikirk Wins Gordon Lepley IV Memorial Teaching Award
The ECE department awarded its most prestigious honor to Dr. Dean Neikirk for teaching excellence. Typical comments from his students are:

• EE 396K - "One of the best courses I've taken."
• EE 440 - "Dr. Neikirk is the most organized and professional instructor I have had."
• EE 397K - "Very informative, very clear, very well prepared."
  

Congratulations, Dr. Neikirk!

Texas Legislature Honors ECE
Wednesday, April 2 the Texas Legislature passed a resolution, sponsored by Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, honoring the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The resolution states in part: "During the last 100 years, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin has produced thousands of graduates. The work of these graduates, along with the faculty of this department, have had a dramatic impact on the State of Texas, our nation and the world. Today, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is consistently ranked among the top ten programs in the United States and is a major reason for the transformation of Texas to a high-tech center. The accomplishments of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department are something in which all Texans can take pride."

IEEE/HKN Fajita Fest!
This spring's IEEE/HKN Fajita Fest was held in Zilker Park. A generous donation from nVidia helped to make the event possible.

Dr. Sandip Tiwari to Speak in
ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series
"Look Beyond the End of Scaling in Nanometer Era"
April 2, 3:00 - 4:00 PM, MER 2.114

The major electronic applications of the coming decades and the technology that would make those applications possible are an important subject of discussion for industry and academia. Usefully employing gigantic scales of integration and working around the end of scaling underlie this subject, and in practice, the biggest challenge this faces is in control of power, design, efficient interconnectivity, and reproducibility in a general purpose technology that serves a useful function. In this talk, Dr. Tiwari will use speculative examples, establish the practical issues in pursuing the examples, and then discuss from group's work on devices (back-plane and nano-scale), circuits (configurable and power-aware), technologies (three-dimensional), and architectures (configurable) that offer a fruitful direction.

The ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series Presents
Dr. Yale Patt: "The microprocessor 20 years from now: Where we will be, where we will not be, and how we will get there?"
March 25, 3:00 - 4:00 PM, ACES Auditorium 2.302

Dr. Yale N. Patt is the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering at UT, where he combines an active program of research, teaching and consulting. He directs the research of 12 graduate students in high performance computer implementation. He teaches graduate and senior level computer architecture courses, and especially enjoys EE 306, Intro to Computing, the first required computing course for EE and CE majors. His honors include the highest award in Computer Architecture, the 1996 IEEE/ACM Eckert Mauchly Award, "for important contributions to instruction level parallelism and superscalar processor design."

ExploreUT Shows Off Undergrad Projects and Makes Dean Streetman Sweat

Engineering Day at the Mall - February 15, 2003

		Photo by Rob Mullenix
Photo by Rob Mullenix			Photo by Rob Mullenix

IEEE Wins Rube Goldberg Machine Contest
A 12-person team headed by Cathy Befi won Monday night’s (Feb. 17) Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, winning $500 and a chance to compete in the national championships at Purdue University in April. More...

(back) Juliet Mitchell, Jonathan Yates, John Mullenix, Cathy Befi, Joseph
Dufresne, Becky Neal (front) Rob Mullenix (not pictured: Garrett Underwood, Ali Saidi, Daniel Fernandez, Kanchan Phalak, Jonathan Wolfe)

Dr. Archie Holmes Wins
2003 Texas Exes Excellence Teaching Award
The Texas Exes sponsor these awards which are given to one outstanding professor and graduate instructor in each school and college. Dr. Holmes is teaching EE339 and EE464K this semester and says, "I believe strongly in education making the lives of people better and want to be involved in helping others learn to educate themselves. By teaching students, I get to be directly involved. A side benefit for me is that my understanding of the material is strengthened by helping others learn it." Dr. Holmes is also the ECE Undergraduate Advisor.

Dr. Jim Plummer, Dean,
School of Engineering, Stanford University
"Interdisciplinary Research - Challenges and Opportunites for USA Schools of Engineering"
Feb. 13, 3-4:00 PM in Aces Auditorium

Jim Plummer is the Dean of the School of Engineering, The Frederick Emmons Terman Professor of Engineering, and the John M. Fluke Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he researches silicon integrated circuit devices and technology. He is a co-inventor of the basic T-RAM technology, and his primary interests are in developing physically based models for silicon structures and fabrication processes and applying these results in the design of new devices, including nanoscale structures, high voltage devices, and devices and circuits aimed at special applications. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of International Rectifier and the Technical Advisory Board of Cypress Semiconductor. Professor Plummer received his B.S. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

A Senior Prepares for Graduation
Kanchan Phalak is in her last semester as an ECE undergrad. Even though she doesn't have a job offer yet, she has plans. "I'm looking at graduate school and lining up interviews."

When asked for the highlights of the last four years, she said, "I got confidence in myself by taking classes and doing well in them and had a great time in IEEE. The camaraderie is great. About half the officers are girls. And I got to be on the team that won last year's E-Week trophy."

CEO Lectures on Corporate Welfare
The ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series presented the President and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, Dr. T. J. Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers believes that governmental money corrupts the creative process of the free market. More..

"Why Silicon Valley should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C."
Jan. 27, 3:00-4:00 PM, ACES Auditorium 2.302