UT ECE graduate students  Jhih-Rong Gao, Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, and their advisor Prof. David Z. Pan won the 2nd Place Award at the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest in Mask Optimization. There are 87 teams from 9 regions around the world participated in the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest, which has three distinct contest problems. This mask optimization problem and benchmarks are provided by IBM, to advance the state-of-the-art of IC design for manufacturing (DFM).

UT ECE Graduate Student Bei Yu won the Silver Medal at the ACM Student Research Competition – Graduate Track, held at the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Bei Yu is supervised by Prof. David Z. Pan.

The ACM Student Reserach Competition is sponsored by Microsoft Research, and is an internationally recognized competition involving research orojects from all areas of design automation.

UT ECE professor Alexis Kwasinski in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant as part of the CyberSEES program for work on investigating techniques to power cellular network base stations from renewable sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaic modules.

Prof. Andrea Alù, Prof. David Pan and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai were all recently named as newly elevated 2014 IEEE Fellows in recognition of the contributions to their respective areas.

The University of Texas at Austin Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering  (UT ECE) hosted the Fall 2013 Senior Design Open House on Monday, November 25, 2013. UT ECE undergraduate seniors presented demonstrations of their projects spanning two semesters of work.

A team of researchers that includes UT ECE Professors Lizy K. John and Andreas Gerstlauer has been awarded a $750,000 grant from NSF's Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program. The project is led by Prof. George Biros and further includes Prof. Robert van de Geijn.

UT ECE professor Vijay Garg has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for his work on developing new synchronization mechanisms for concurrent programs. The project aims to develop new synchronization mechanisms with the goal to make synchronization as simple and intuitive as possible for programmers.

UT ECE graduate student Chenchen Li recently won first prize in the 2013 FEKO Student Competition. Chenchen's research was "motivated by significant concerns in the radar community about the rapidly growing number of wind farms.  These concerns arose from the time-varying radar clutter caused by wind turbines that can interfere with radar detection and tracking operations.  Chenchen pointed out in his entry that it is important to understand the dynamic radar signatures from wind turbines in order to devise mitigation approaches."

UT ECE professor Andrea Alu has been named the recipient of the inaugural 2013 Franco Strazzabosco Award. The award recognizes an Italian engineer under 40 for his entrepreneurial courage in applying scientific discoveries to public advantage.

UT ECE graduate student Francesco Monticone received an IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Doctoral Research Award for his project proposal entitled "Molding the Scattering Response with Metamaterials and Plasmonics."