Cell phone antennas, radio receivers and GPS devices may one day go incognito. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta propose a new cloaking method that cancels out the electromagnetic waves bouncing off an object. The concept may ultimately lead to surreptitious sensors that can collect and send messages without detection.

Professors Sanjay Banerjee and Emanuel Tutuc have demonstrated, for the first time, that centimeter-square areas of copper foils can be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene bringing this intriguing material one step closer to commercial viability. Graphene, formed with carbon atoms linked together like nanoscopic chicken wire, holds great potential for nanoelectronics. It also shows promise for electrical energy storage, for use in composites, for thermal management, in chemical-biological sensing, and as a new sensing material for ultra-sensitive pressure sensors.

UT-ECE research to be published in the journal Science demonstrates, for the first time, that centimeter-square areas of copper foils can be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene bringing this intriguing material one step closer to commercial viability. Graphene, formed with carbon atoms linked together like nanoscopic chicken wire, holds great potential for nanoelectronics.

UT-ECE, IEEE Central Texas Section, door64, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and 1,000 engineers celebrated the 125th anniversary of the IEEE at Austin's Goodwill Center.

from ScienceNews:

Cell phone antennas, radio receivers and GPS devices may one day go incognito. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta propose a new cloaking method that cancels out the electromagnetic waves bouncing off an object. The concept may ultimately lead to surreptitious sensors that can collect and send messages without detection.

Long-time External Advisory Committee member and UT-ECE alumnus, Mark Papermaster, was named an ECE Fellow last week. Mark has been instrumental in raising our profile and forging relationships with industry, says Chairman Tony Ambler. We have been very lucky to have his help and guidance on EAC.

Professor Yale Patt's keynote address at the 2009 PPoPP conference unleashed a hailstorm of protest from industry programmers that may lead to real change in commercial programming and computer architecture education. According to Ed Burnette on ZDNet, Dr. Patt had three main points: multi-core is not the holy grail, most programmers are stupid, and there should be lots of low-level interfaces for the non-stupid ones to use.

ECE professor, Dean Neikirk, just received funding for a 5-year program to use wireless sensors to identify failing bridges, lower the cost of monitoring those bridges, and improve the safety of new bridges. The $6.8M project addresses a chronic problem for the aging American highway infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, deferred maintenance has left one-quarter of the nation’s bridges deficient. Congress mandated 2-year inspections in 1971, but at least 17,000 bridges did not meet the requirement in 2008, including 3 out of every 100 freeway bridges.

Dr. Mattan Erez's research focus is computer architecture. Specifically, he is interested in the critical aspects of locality, parallelism and bandwidth constraints to overcome the limitations of today's architectures. One goal is to improve cooperation between the hardware, compiler and programmer in order to enable new levels of performance, efficiency and code-portability.

Dr. Seth Bank's research into III-V compound semiconductors could cool down your laptop, increase the capacity and speed of fiber-optics, and make solar cells more efficient. Bank hopes to improve III-V compound semiconductors—used for everything from cell phone transistors to LED's in traffic lights—by embedding semi-metal nanoparticles in them.