ECE alumnus James Truchard (Ph.D. '74) worked at UT's Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) for only two years before he, and fellow ARL employees Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin, founded National Instruments (NI). Thirty two years later, the company has 4,000 employees, direct operations in 41 countries, and nearly $1 billion in sales.

Dr. Robert Flake has discovered the first non-sinusoid signal that doesn’t undergo dispersion on transmission lines that would normally distort a signal. The waveform, “Speedy Delivery” (SD), is a pulse with a positive exponential leading edge.

One possible use of SD to develop a new generation of high-resolution TDR instruments. TDR stands for time-domain reflectometer. TDRs send an electrical pulse through a metal cable encased in the foundation of a structure. Any impedance, such as a crack, sends the signal back towards the source.

Dr. Ted Rappaport has been recognized twice recently. He won an award at the Texas Wireless Summit—the 2008 AWA Wireless Industry Leadership Award.  He has also been appointed to the IEEE Board of Governors for the Vehicular Technology Society for 2009-2011. He already serves on the IEEE Board of Governors for the Communication Society (COMSOC).

Dr. Robert W. Heath, Jr. just won a National Science Foundation Award to research signal processing on special manifolds with applications to wireless communication. To meet the demand for wireless communication, wireless systems may employ new concepts such as multiple antennas, multiple user processing, transmitter coordination, and interference alignment. Implementing these techniques requires development of algorithms that exploit structure in the underlying signals. Dr.

Shayak Banerjee, a Ph.D. candidate being supervised by Professor Michael Orshansky, has won an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. The fellowships are awarded worldwide and are intensely competitive. Only 60 students were awarded this fellowship for 2007-08. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded tuition fees, and a stipend for one nine-month academic year. The fellowship is usually followed by an internship at IBM.

Dr. Derek Chiou displays a motherboard that includes reconfigurable hardware he is using to develop a simulator that is thousands of times faster than current simulators. Once developed, the new simulator will enable computer architects and users to better evaluate the complex behavior of computer systems. Chiou received a $300,000 Department of Energy grant for the research.

Hurricane Katrina helped ECE power researcher, Alexis Kwasinski, formulate a new plan for the U.S. telecom system: a de-centralized telecom architecture that would have kept the lights and the phones on in New Orleans.

Sun Microsystems awarded ECE Research Fellow Mark McDermott a $20K award for Best University Level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI Course. McDermott received the prize for EE 382M-8, VLSI II.

Chan-Byoung Chae, a Ph. D. candidate supervised by Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr., has been awarded the 2008 IEEE VTS Dan E. Noble Fellowship Award. The fellowship recognizes an individual most likely to impact the areas of concentration of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society including wireless, and mobile radio. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in wireless communications can receive. The award will be presented at the IEEE VTS Conference (VTC) in Calgary, Canada on September 23rd.

Professor Yale Patt was one of five speakers to address the Mexican Congress at a 50th Anniversary Celebration of the first computer installed in Mexico. The title of his talk was Future Microprocessors and their Implications for Computer Science Education in Mexico.