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.

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.

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. 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.

Professor Christine Julien is using a grant from the National Science Foundation to solve persistent problems posed by delay-tolerant networks (DTNs)—heteterogeneous networks with spotty connectivity. DTNs are the norm in remote areas with inadequate energy resources and mobile nodes, complicating search and rescue operations and third world communications.

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.

Professor David Pan and UT graduate students, Ashutosh Chakraborty and Anurag Kumar, took home the $25,000 Grand Prize in the eASIC Placement Design Challenge. The worldwide competition was to create a tool that determines the most efficient placement of components on a structured application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) platform. Placement with shorter wirelength translates to better performance and less power consumption. Their placement tool, RegPlace, outperformed the second place team from the University of Michigan by 15% in total wirelength.

ECE researcher Dr. Mark Flynn is greening ports world-wide by adding flywheels to cargo handling machinery. Flynn's high-speed motor controller design has been incorporated into flywheel energy storage systems sold by Vycon, Inc.

ECE professors, Mack Grady and Surya Santoso, are collecting the data needed to truly integrate wind power into the existing power grid—and creating the first university-lead phasor measurement network in the country.

University of Texas professors, Mack Grady and Surya Santoso, are another step closer to truly integrating wind power into the existing power grid. They are heading a consortium of private and public entities to create the first university-lead phasor measurement network in the country.