The new Regents’ Entrepreneur distinction was approved at the board’s February 2022 meeting and is granted to outstanding full-time tenured faculty members who have an established reputation as successful innovators and who have taken their research into a commercial setting. The Regents’ Entrepreneur designation is bestowed by the board only upon the unanimous recommendation of the USG institution president, the chief academic officer, and the chancellor, and upon the approval of the Committee on Academic Affairs

“Farrokh is exceptionally deserving of being ECE’s first Regents’ Entrepreneur,” said Arijit Raychowdhury, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “He has been a leader in establishing a culture within ECE — following the Institute’s strategic goals — that encourages entrepreneurship and technology transfer. I am thrilled that he has been chosen by the USG Board of Regents and the Georgia Tech administration to hold this title.”

Ayazi’s research, which focuses on MEMS and microsystems, has allowed him to establish two start-up companies based on intellectual property (IP) developed at Georgia Tech: Qualtré and StethX Microsystems.

Qualtré commercialized a new class of acoustic microgyroscopes (‘gyros’) integrated on a chip that operate in the ultrasonic frequency range with much improved small-scale accuracy. Applications include guidance, automotive, defense and personal navigation. Qualtré commercialized low-cost chip-scale gyroscopes for GPS-free navigation of autonomous cars and unmanned air vehicles before being acquired by Panasonic in December 2016.

Ayazi also founded and serves as managing director of StethX Microsystems, which is commercializing a wearable micro-chip for long-term recording of mechano-acoustic cardiopulmonary signals. The data recorded can identify indications of asthma, COPD, and pneumonia.

In addition to Ayazi, four other Tech faculty members were bestowed the Regents’ Entrepreneur designation, including four in the College of Engineering (CoE). They include Kirk Bowman, professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs; Andrei Fedorov, Neely Chair and professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences; Mark Prausnitz, Regents’ Professor, J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Gleb Yushin, professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering. In total, six CoE faculty members were honored with Regents’ titles.

Read the press release about this year’s Regents’ Professors, Researchers, and Entrepreneurs.

The title of Mannem’s research is “Millimeter-Wave MIMO Transmitter Systems for Reliability, Security, and Sensing.” His research is primarily targeted at improving the communication reliability and security of phased array systems by employing circuit and architecture level techniques. 

Phased array systems are extensively being employed in 5G and emerging 6G communication systems to enhance communication distance, steer the transmitting beam towards the end-user, and for improved data rate through spatial MIMO. However, conventional phased arrays exhibit several inherent limitations such as reduced communication reliability due to antenna load variations and limited communication security. Moreover, they often need extremely precise beam alignment between the transmitting base station and the end-user; failure to do so results in degraded data rate. 

To achieve a reliable communication link even under large antenna load variations of 3:1 voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), Mannem and his colleagues proposed a Reconfigurable Hybrid Series/Parallel Doherty Power Amplifier. To improve the security of a communication link between a transmitter and the desired receiver, they exploit the inherent spatial selectivity that a phased array offers and extend its security performance by using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, realizing a truly directional and secure communication. Further, they proposed new array architectures to enable extremely precise beam alignment between transmitter and receiver in an array communication system. 

Mannem was a recipient of the ISSCC Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2021. He was a recipient of the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) best student paper award (2nd place) at RFIC 2021 and a co-recipient of the best student paper award 2nd place at IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS), 2021.

In the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, ten recently minted Ph.D. graduates and postdoctoral fellows/associates have been hired into faculty positions, despite these difficult and uncertain circumstances. Six have been hired by universities in the United States, while four have accepted positions in Saudi Arabia and South Korea. 

“We are extremely proud of our recent Ph.D. graduates and recently completed postdocs and all of their accomplishments,” said Douglas M. Blough, the Interim Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “They have been prepared very well by their advisors and by the experiences that they have had at Georgia Tech. We wish them the very best at their new university homes and in all that they choose to pursue in the future.” 

In a world that continues to need the expertise of engineering and science faculty more than ever, here are ten new additions to academia, all hailing from the Georgia Tech School of ECE.

Maad Alowaifeer

Maad Alowaifeer graduated with his Ph.D. in summer 2021 and worked in the Power Systems Control and Automation Laboratory. He started work this fall as an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at The King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). 

The title of Alowaifeer’s Ph.D. thesis is “Microgrid Energy Management System with Ancillary Services to the Grid.” The research founded methodologies to optimally manage the consumption and production of electric energy in microgrids, which are small electric networks with multiple controllable energy resources. 

The management is performed considering the provision of ancillary services to the main grid, which are essential capabilities needed to operate the main grid appropriately. The demand for ancillary services has been increasing due to the installation of renewable resources. By supporting the main grid from microgrids, these increasing needs may be satisfied, and thus pave the way towards more installation of renewable resources.

Alowaifeer was advised by A.P. Sakis Meliopoulos, who holds the Georgia Power Distinguished Professorship in ECE. Meliopoulos said that decarbonization of the electric energy sector has generated new challenges due to the variability of renewable resources. 

“Dr. Alowaifeer's research provided new paradigms for optimal electric energy utilization and electric energy system reliability via microgrids, providing reliable solutions to the new challenges,” Meliopoulos said. “The area is of great interest to the continuing decarbonization of the electric energy sector and an area of intense academic and industrial research. Dr. Alowaifeer was offered the academic position to develop this area of research at KFUPM.”

Bahar Asgari

Bahar Asgari graduated with her Ph.D. in spring 2021. Starting in July 2022, she will start working as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently working at Google on its system infrastructure team. 

The title of Asgari’s thesis is “Efficiently Accelerating Sparse Problems by Enabling Stream Accesses to Memory Using Hardware/Software Techniques.” Today, a significant portion of supercomputer workloads are sparse problems. However, as they are not able to use more than a tiny fraction of the peak performance of today's computers, they waste millions of dollars and thousands of Joules of energy, and yet cannot run fast enough. 

Asgari’s research proposes low-cost hardware accelerators and hardware/software co-optimization to deal with the unsolved but essential challenges of sparse problems and help them run quickly and efficiently. The results of her research have contributed to widespread application areas of sparse problems, including machine learning, computer vision, self-driving cars, and scientific computing.

Asgari worked in both the High Performance Computer Architecture Lab and the Computer Architecture and System Lab at Georgia Tech. She was advised by Hyesoon Kim, a professor in the School of Computer Science, and the late Sudhakar Yalamanchili, who was a Regents Professor in the School of ECE. “Bahar is intelligent and very focused,” Kim said. “She likes advising and teaching students. Her students will be lucky to have her as an advisor, similar to I was lucky to have an opportunity to work with her.”

Ningyuan Cao

Ningyuan Cao graduated with his Ph.D. in summer 2020 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in ECE for the last year. He began working as an assistant professor this fall in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. 

The title of Cao’s Ph.D. thesis is “Circuit and Algorithm Design to Enable Edge Intelligence.” As a part of his graduate research, Cao made fundamental contributions to the design of ultralow power mixed-signal circuits that can enable Edge-intelligence. In particular, his work has provided the hardware techniques needed to enable machine learning in sub-10mW systems through innovations in circuit- and hardware-friendly algorithm design. 

His research has been published in leading conferences, such as the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference and the VLSI Symposium, and journals like the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems. His work was highlighted in a number of technical media articles, including EE Times and Wired. 

While at Tech, Cao worked in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, which is led by his advisor, Arijit Raychowdhury. “I am very excited to see Ningyuan join the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. His graduate work and his current post-doctoral research addresses critical circuit design challenges,” said Raychowdhury, who holds the Motorola Solutions Foundation Professorship in ECE. “Having worked with Ningyuan over the years, I am confident that he will not only be a successful, independent researcher, but also a fantastic educator and mentor.”

Zackory Erickson

Zackory Erickson was an ECE student who graduated with his Ph.D. through the interdisciplinary robotics doctoral program during summer 2021. He joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University this fall as an assistant professor.

The title of Erickson’s thesis is “Robotic Caregivers — Simulation and Capacitive Servoing for Physical Human-Robot Interaction.” Physical human-robot interaction and robotic assistance presents an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people, including the millions of older adults and people with physical disabilities who have difficulty performing activities of daily living (ADLs) on their own. This research presents new techniques for robotic caregivers, including haptic perspective-taking, capacitive sensing for tracking human pose, and physics simulation for assistive robots.   

Erickson was advised by Charles C. Kemp, who is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Zackory is an emerging leader in robotics who is making intelligent robotic caregivers a reality,” said Kemp, who leads the Healthcare Robotics Lab. “I would not be surprised if I personally benefit from Zackory’s research someday as I become older and require assistance. Paradoxically, that is something I look forward to!”

Yan Fang

Yan Fang earned his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, and shortly afterward, he came to Georgia Tech to conduct postdoctoral research in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab.Starting this fall, Fang began working as an assistant professor in the Department of ECE at the Marietta, Georgia campus of Kennesaw State University. 

While at Tech, Fang conducted research on brain-inspired computing based on emerging nano-devices. He has made significant contributions to the design of novel circuits and systems that implement certain computational properties of biological networks. His work has impacted the areas at the intersection of energy-efficient learning and optimization with applications to robotics and other intelligent devices.

Fang worked with ECE Professor Arijit Raychowdhury during his postdoctoral assignment. Raychowdhury called him one of the most dedicated and independent researchers at this early career stage that he has seen. 

“Yan is a mentor to many of my undergraduate students and has a very broad perspective of his work. He enjoys teaching and working with others, and academia is the natural choice for him,” Raychowdhury said. “I am very happy to see him start as an assistant professor at Kennesaw State, where he can play an instrumental role in both research, as well as teaching the next generation of ECE students.”

Min-gu Kim

In spring 2019, Min-gu Kim received his Ph.D. in ECE, where he was a member of the Integrated Sensing Systems (iSenSys) Lab. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University until last February. Kim started working as an assistant professor this past spring in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering at Inha University, which is located in Incheon, South Korea. 

The title of Kim’s thesis is “All-Soft Electronic Devices and Integrated Microsystems Enabled by Liquid Metal.” Kim’s thesis work has been in the area of soft electronics, which are electronics that are bendable and stretchable. In particular, he researched the use of liquid metal conductors embedded into soft polymers for sensing and energy storage applications. Kim then developed new fabrication processes that pushed the ability to pattern liquid metal structures to sub-micrometer dimensions for the first time. 

ECE Professor Oliver Brand, who served as Kim’s Ph.D. advisor, said that Kim started a completely new research thrust in the area of soft electronics in the iSenSys Lab. “Min-gu published his research results in high-impact journals, including Nature Communications, ACS Nano, and Advanced Functional Materials, and joined Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow after completing his Ph.D.,” Brand said. “Considering his passion for research, his creativity, and his interest in teaching, it was no surprise to me that he was hired into a faculty position at Inha University.”

Jingfei Liu

Jingfei Liu graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE in fall 2020 after working in the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory. This past spring, he began working as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University.

The title of Liu’s thesis is “Development of Ultrasound Elastography Methods for Biomechanical Assessment of Soft Tissue in Medical Diagnosis.” The objective of Liu’s dissertation research is to develop novel ultrasound elastography, or elasticity imaging, methods for medical diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, as well as image-guided therapy. 

Because many pathological and physiological processes of human beings, including cancer, fibrosis, and aging, can cause tissue elasticity change, tissue elasticity characterization can provide valuable information for medical diagnosis and therapy. Liu’s research is focused on addressing the challenges of the current ultrasound elastography technology by improving elasticity image quality, characterizing non-bulk tissues/organs, and overcoming the effects of physiological motions in degrading imaging quality and measurement accuracy.

Liu was advised by Stanislav Emelianov, who is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in ECE and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He said that Liu was a hardworking and independent student from the beginning. “Jingfei was eager to identify his own projects, he conducted the studies, and he trained other students and interns,” said Emelianov. “At the end of his tenure in our lab, he was acting as a junior faculty member – I am not surprised that he became one.”

Oluwaseun Sangodoyin

Oluwaseun (Seun) Sangodoyin graduated with his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in August 2018. Starting in November 2018, he began work as postdoctoral fellow with Georgia Tech ECE Professor Alenka Zajic in the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Lab. 

Sangodoyin recently completed his postdoctoral assignment with Zajic in August 2021. He has been appointed as a Sutterfield Family Postdoctoral Scholar and is now working with ECE and BME Professor Stanislav Emelianov in the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory. Sangodoyin will begin his career as a Georgia Tech ECE assistant professor in August 2022.

Sangodoyin’s work is at the intersection of bioelectronics and wireless communication and entails leveraging transistor switching in microchips for communication and sensing in brain implants and gastrointestinal devices. One advantage that his work affords is the creation of smaller-sized biomedical implants – or bioimplants – that are especially useful for hard-to-reach areas in the body. Other advantages include the low power consumption in bioimplants and high data rate communication to facilitate real-time transmission of physiological information from bioimplants and ingestible devices. 

Zajic said that Sangodoyin was an excellent postdoc in her research group, and they were able to publish several papers in various prestigious journals. He was also able to take advantage of the multi-disciplinary research structure that Georgia Tech affords and carved out a novel research area for himself. 

“I am glad that Seun’s exceptional research accomplishments, dedication to any task at hand, and his ability to innovate in various research areas have culminated into him securing a position as an assistant professor in the School of ECE here at Georgia Tech,” said Zajic, who holds a Ken Byers Professorship in ECE. “I have no doubt that he will be a great addition to our faculty.”

Wonbo Shim

Wonbo Shim joined Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral researcher in June 2019. Prior to joining Tech, Shim spent six years as a hardware engineer at Samsung. He graduated with his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Seoul National University in 2013. This fall, Shim joined the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering as an assistant professor at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology in Seoul, South Korea. 

During his two-year stay at Tech, Shim worked in the Laboratory for Emerging Devices and Circuits, where he conducted research on nonvolatile memory-based device and circuit design for compute-in-memory architecture. This technology is one of the emerging paradigms for artificial intelligence hardware acceleration. 

Shim worked with ECE Associate Professor Shimeng Yu, who said that Shim had a very fruitful tenure as a postdoctoral fellow in his lab. “Wonbo was productive in publications in premier journals and conferences in the field of semiconductor devices, circuits, and systems,” Yu said. “One notable impact that Wonbo brought to the lab is state-of-the-art industrial insight on 3D NAND memory architecture from his past experience as a Samsung engineer.”

Jong-Hyeok Yoon

Jong-Hyeok Yoon joined Georgia Tech as a post-doctoral researcher in 2018, shortly after graduating from KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea. During his time at Tech, Yoon worked in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab. This fall, he began working as an assistant professor at the Department of Information and Communication Engineering at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Daegu, South Korea.

While at Tech, Yoon worked on the design of low-power hardware for autonomous systems. He proposed, designed, and measured a neuromorphic SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) accelerator integrated circuit for edge-robotics. He also made significant contributions to the design of Resistive RAM-based accelerators in a foundry process, one of the first such demonstrations in the country. 

Yoon’s work has been published in leading conferences, such as the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference and the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and journals like the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. He won the best paper award at IEEE CICC in 2021.

Yoon worked with ECE Professor Arijit Raychowdhury during his tenure as a postdoctoral fellow. Raychowdury described him as an amazing circuit researcher with a deep understanding of both digital as well as mixed-signal designs. 

“Jong-Hyeok needed very little guidance from me during his post-doctoral research and has led key research vectors in my group,” Raychowdhury said. “His work has made significant contributions to the design of low-power accelerators for robotics, and I am excited to see him return to his homeland and continue research and teaching at DGIST.”

Photo grid cutline: New Engineering Faculty Members, All Hailing from Georgia Tech ECE. Top row (l-r): Maad Alowaifeer, Bahar Asgari, Ningyuan Cao, Zackory Erickson, and Yan Fang. Bottom row (l-r): Min-gu Kim, Jingfei Liu, Oluwaseun Sangodoyin, Wonbo Shim, and Jong-Hyeok Yoon.

An IEEE MTT-S Distinguished Microwave Lecturer typically deliver five to seven talks per year. For each class of these lecturers, only three or four are selected worldwide each year. Manos Tentzeris, who is ECE’s Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics, previously served in this role from 2010-2012.

During his two-year term as an IEEE MTT-S Distinguished Microwave Lecturer, Wang will lecture on broadband and energy-efficient RF/mm-Wave/THz integrated circuits and systems for beyond-5G and 6G communications and sensing. He will also speak on wireless systems for ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), sensing, and hardware security.

Wang is the director of the Georgia Tech Center of Circuits and Systems (CCS), and he leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-Systems (GEMS) Lab. His research interests include innovating analog, RF, mm-Wave, and THz integrated circuits and hybrid systems for wireless communications, sensing, and bioelectronics applications.

Wang is the recipient of the 2020 DARPA Director's Fellowship, 2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award, 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2017 IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He held the Georgia Tech ECE Demetrius T. Paris Professorship from 2014-2018.

The QFA supports key professors and their research, with the goal of strengthening Qualcomm’s engagement with faculty who also play a key role in Qualcomm’s recruiting of top graduate students.

There is a rapidly growing need for high-performance RF, millimeter wave (mm-Wave), and terahertz (THz) front-end circuits and transceiver systems to address the numerous 5G and Beyond 5G wireless communications and sensing applications. Wang's research group has pioneered a variety of novel circuit topologies and system architectures that are agnostic to process technology platforms and can radically improve the bandwidth, energy-efficiency, robustness, and reconfigurability of RF, mm-Wave, and THz circuits and systems. Wang's research has led to multiple papers in premier venues every year, including the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC).

Wang is an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He is the director of the Georgia Tech Center of Circuits and Systems (CCS), and he leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-Systems (GEMS) Lab. His research interests include innovating analog, RF, mm-Wave, and THz integrated circuits and hybrid systems for wireless communications, sensing, and bioelectronics applications.

Wang is also the recipient of the 2020 DARPA Director's Fellowship, 2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award, 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2017 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He held the Georgia Tech ECE Demetrius T. Paris Professorship from 2014-2018.

Wang has authored or co-authored over 190 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. His GEMS research group has won multiple academic awards and best paper awards, including the 2021 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, 2019 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar, the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium Best Student Paper Awards (2014, 2016, and 2018), the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) Outstanding Student Paper Awards (2015, 2018, and 2019), the IEEE CICC Best Conference Paper Award (2017), the 2016 IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award, and the IEEE SENSORS Best Live Demo Award (2016).

In the blog, he and two professors from the Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Oulu (Finland) described their research, how they use GF’s technologies, and what working with GF has meant for them and their students. Their diverse research and educational interests illustrate GF’s commitment to 6G and show how the company’s strategies and technologies are helping to make advances in 6G possible, better, faster, and more cost-effective.

Read more about Wang’s research and the entire GF blog post, written by Gary Dagastine

Pamela Bhatti

Matthieu Bloch

Wenshan Cai

Alenka Zajic

Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure

Lukas Graber

Tushar Krishna

“Granting promotion and tenure are very carefully considered actions, and they are significant milestones that each of these faculty members worked extremely hard to reach,” said Magnus Egerstedt, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in ECE. “We are very proud of Pamela, Matthieu, Wenshan, Lukas, Tushar, and Alenka, and we thank them for their contributions to our research and educational programs and to the profession as a whole.”

Since 2006, NSREC has awarded separate accolades for outstanding papers: one reserved for student submissions and one for the best overall conference paper. Since this distinction was instituted, this is only the third time that a student has been awarded the overall Outstanding Paper Award. Tzintzarov also received this award as a co-author in 2018 and 2019. 

Tzintzarov is Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, and is advised by ECE Professor John D. Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics. Tzintzarov received his B.S and M.S in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2016 and 2020, respectively. 

The paper, “Optical Single-Event Transients Induced in Integrated Silicon-Photonic Waveguides by Two-Photon Absorption,” was co-authored by Adrian Ildefonso, Jeffrey W. Teng, Milad Frounchi, Albert Djikeng, Prahlad Iyengar, Patrick S. Goley, Ani Khachatrian, Joel Hales, Ryan Bahr, Stephen P. Buchner, Dale McMorrow, and John D. Cressler. This work, which was performed in collaboration with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., experimentally confirmed the existence of Optical Single-Event Transients (OSETs) in silicon integrated waveguides.

Energized particles in space, such as heavy ions which typically emanate from interstellar space, can deposit energy into spacecraft systems. This energy can cause malfunctions, signal glitches, or even spacecraft terminal failures. Over the past several decades, these phenomena, called “single-event effects,” have been well characterized for electrical systems. However, emerging interest of using optical communications systems (which function very differently than electrical systems) for space has raised the question: “Can optical communications systems survive in the harsh, heavy-ion rich space environment?”

While this question is far from being answered with certainty, and may vary from system to system, the work in Tzintzarov’s paper provided the first experimental confirmation of optical single-event transients (OSETs). Tzintzarov showed that OSETs perturb optical signals in a silicon waveguide. Since silicon waveguides are a major building block of silicon-integrated optical systems, the results from this paper raise concerns for the use of integrated silicon photonic systems for space applications. 

A full-length journal paper on this conference presentation has already been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and will be published in a special issue of the journal in April 2021. This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency under contract HDTRA1-16-1-0018 and HDTRA-11710053, and by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1650044.

Mannem and Munzer received these awards for the excellence of their integrated circuits related Ph.D. research and their academic performance. They are both members of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, where they are advised by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang.

The title of Mannem’s research is “Reliable and Secure Communication Systems.” His research is primarily targeted at improving the performance of phased array communication systems by employing circuit and architecture level techniques. Phased array systems are being employed in 5G and beyond 5G communication systems both to achieve a higher array gain and extend the distance of operation. However, conventional beamforming arrays exhibit several inherent limitations such as antenna voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) variations at large scan angles and limited security. 

To achieve a reliable communication link even under a large antenna VSWR of 3:1, Mannem and his colleagues proposed a Reconfigurable Hybrid Series/Parallel Doherty Power Amplifier. To improve the security of a communication link between a transmitter and the desired receiver, they exploit the inherent spatial selectivity that a phased array offers and extends its security performance by using multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, realizing a truly directional and secure communication. This work was published at the 2020 International Solid-State Circuits Conference and in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

The title of Munzer’s research is “Broadband VSWR Resilient Transmitters and Built in Self-Test (BiST).” In order to compensate for the large path loss at mm-Wave frequencies, phased arrays are used. However, the antenna elements couple with one another, which causes the impedance presented to the electronics to deviate from the ideal 50Ω terminations in which they were designed for. This issue compromises both the array’s radiation pattern, as well as the electronics’ performance in both linearity and efficiency. 

To address this challenge, Munzer and his colleagues investigate different sensing circuitry to detect the antenna's impedance and real power delivered, so that they can reconfigure both the electronics and overall array under these load mismatch conditions. The broadband performance of the transceiver electronics and BiST circuitry allows these designs to cover both the commercial and military 5G frequency bands.

Frounchi is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is a member of the Silicon-Germanium Devices and Circuits Group. He is advised by John Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics in the School of ECE.  

This predoctoral achievement award is for Frounchi's Ph.D. research on “Millimeter-Wave Quadrature Receivers for Atmospheric Sensing and Data Communications.” His designs take advantage of highly balanced quadrature signal generation techniques and novel integrations of front-end RF circuits to provide a low noise solution for CubeSat-based radiometry and next-generation communication applications.

Frounchi received the bachelor's degree (with honors) from the University of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012, and the master's degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2014. He recently received the 2020 MTT-Sat Challenge Award, given by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, and has published 22 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals.

Nguyen and Yilmaz graduated with their Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) this past summer, and they now work for companies in Atlanta. Nguyen works for Synopsys, and Yilmaz works for Aether Argus. They were co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Alenka Zajic and Milos Prvulovic, who is a professor in the School of Computer Science. Both Zajic and Prvulovic are co-authors on the paper.

The title of Nguyen’s and Yilmaz’s award-winning paper is “A Novel Golden-Chip-Free Clustering Technique Using Backscattering Side Channel for Hardware Trojan Detection.” This paper demonstrated that hardware Trojans can be detected using backscattering RF side-channels, which are signals that were discovered by the authors, and anomaly detection techniques without having a "golden sample," a fabricated sample verified to be free of hardware Trojans. 

This paper was able to achieve 100% accuracy when testing 100 boards and classifying them into infected and non-infected categories using backscattering RF side-channels of the chips on those boards, including in noisy environments with multiple active devices present. This technology will enable improved supply chain security by testing devices prior to deployment.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Frounchi is advised by John Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics. Frounchi received the bachelor's degree (with honors) from the University of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012, and the master's degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2014. 

Quantifying and predicting climatological changes in atmospheric temperature has been identified as a critical earth science need in several major studies. However, lower-to-middle tropospheric temperature trends of climatological origin are of order as low as ~0.16^oC/decade, and high-performance radiometers are needed to observe these trends. 

Frounchi’s research is focused on designing RF and mm-wave integrated circuits for atmospheric sensing and providing a low SWaP-C solution for weather CubeSats. This research has been supported in part by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) space initiative. In addition, Orbital MicroSystems has partnered with Georgia Tech to commercialize these mm-wave radiometers and deploy a constellation of weather satellites and supply the observed data products to government and commercial customers. This research has resulted in nine peer-reviewed publications and a U.S. patent.

The basis for awarding this grant is exceptional promise as a student in any of the fields of NPSS and showing exceptional work in those fields. Tzintzarov’s research focuses on understanding how radiation environments, specifically in space, affect the functionality and usability of silicon photonic circuits and systems for applications such as space optical communications and remote sensing.

Tzintzarov has accumulated over 1,000 hours of conducting radiation experiments at world-class radiation facilities such as the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focused X-ray micro-beam at Argonne National Laboratory, and focused high-intensity lasers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The results of these testing campaigns are used to analyze the survivability of current technologies and engineer future technologies to function in extremely high radiation-intense environments, such as those found around Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Tzintzarov received the bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016 and 2020, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, where he is advised by John D. Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Tzintzarov was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2018 and has received numerous awards from Georgia Tech, including the Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award and the Love Family Foundation Award, both in 2016.

Tzintzarov’s research has been supported in part by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation, and has resulted in 16 authored/co-authored peer-reviewed journal publications with two conference oral presentations.

Cressler has been a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2002. He is currently the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics and the Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion. 

A mainstay in the ECE microelectronics instructional program, Cressler has also introduced three new courses into three different areas of the Georgia Tech curriculum, ECE 6444: “Silicon-based Heterostructure Devices and Circuits;” CoE 3002: “Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution;” and IAC 2002: “Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue,” which is taught through the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.  

Cressler has written books for each of these three courses. Silicon Earth (2016), now in its second edition and also translated into Chinese. Meant for a general audience, the book serves CoE 3002, which is intended for all majors, including both business and liberal arts students. Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors (2003, with G. Niu) is the most widely cited textbook in this field and serves his graduate course, ECE 6444. In all of his courses during his 28+ year career, Cressler ends each of his classes, including IAC 2002, with a handed-out quotation and a sharing of a personal reflection relevant to his students’ lives. For this purpose, he compiled over 600 quotations and reflections in the book, Reinventing Teenagers (2004).

Cressler's career-long teaching effectiveness average is a 4.9, and he is a fully dedicated mentor to the students in his classes. On the research side, Cressler has mentored and graduated 60 Ph.D. students during his academic career (50 at Georgia Tech), and he and his team have published over 750 archival papers. The graduates of his research group have continued onto successful and meaningful careers in industry, academia, and government labs and agencies.

Cressler has received several high-level IEEE teaching and mentoring awards and has been presented with Georgia Tech’s top honors in undergraduate teaching and graduate student mentoring. In 2013, he was recognized with Georgia Tech's highest award for faculty, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Since that time, the School has changed its name to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and it has changed in many other ways over the years. Among those changes are that it now has 13 women in its faculty ranks.

This group of female faculty is one of the largest in any ECE unit in the United States. Their areas of interest span electrical energy, bioengineering, wireless communications, and everything in between. These are the Women of ECE at Georgia Tech.

Read more about Georgia Tech's ECE female faculty members. 

Since that time, the School has changed its name to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and it has changed in many other ways over the years. Among those changes are that it now has 13 women in its faculty ranks.

This group of female faculty is one of the largest in any ECE unit in the United States. Their areas of interest span electrical energy, bioengineering, wireless communications, and everything in between. These are the Women of ECE at Georgia Tech.

Read more about our female faculty members. 

After graduating from Georgia Tech with her Ph.D. in 2008, Zajic spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory and two years as a visiting assistant professor in Tech's School of Computer Science. In 2012, she joined ECE as an assistant professor, and in 2017, she was promoted to associate professor. 

Zajic leads the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Laboratory, where she advises 10 Ph.D. students and two postdoctoral fellows who work in the areas of propagation, enabling communication, and improving data security in challenging environments, such as vehicle-to-vehicle wireless radio communications, underwater acoustic communications, and communications inside a processor chip. To date, Zajic has graduated nine Ph.D. students and five M.S. students. She advises undergraduate students on individual projects and through the Opportunity Research Scholars Program. Zajic and her research group have received six best paper, poster, or demonstration awards since she joined ECE as a faculty member.

Zajic’s specific research interests focus on understanding mechanisms that generate electromagnetic (EM) side-channel emanations in modern computers and on locating sources of information-carrying EM emanations in complex environments. She has received over $18 million in research funding as a PI or co-PI, mostly from NSF, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Zajic has published over 140 refereed journal and conference publications. She has three awarded patents and five patent applications pending. Her work has been publicized locally and internationally through The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NSF Science 360, Voice of America, Wired, and many other outlets. Zajic has served as an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and Wiley Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. She also served as the chair of the Atlanta chapter of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society/Antennas and Propagation Society from 2015-2017, and during that time, the group received the IEEE Outstanding Chapter Award in 2016. She received the IEEE Atlanta Section Outstanding Engineer Award in 2019. 

Equally devoted to teaching excellence and service, Zajic has developed or redesigned both undergraduate and graduate courses and has taught a flipped classroom version of ECE 3025–Electromagnetics. For her efforts, she has received several teaching awards, including the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Junior Teacher Award in 2016 and the LexisNexis Dean’s Excellence Award in 2016-2017. Zajic has also participated in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Class of 1969 Teaching Scholars Program. She is an active member of the ECE and Georgia Tech community, currently serving as the director of the M.S. Cybersecurity degree program; a member of the ECE Statutory Advisory Committee; a member of the College of Engineering Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure committee; and a member of a working group on the professional development of graduate students, an initiative coordinated from the Provost’s Office.

In the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, ten current Ph.D. students, newly minted Ph.D. graduates, and postdoctoral fellows/associates have been hired into faculty positions, despite these difficult circumstances. Seven have been hired by universities in the United States, while three have accepted positions in Saudi Arabia, Chile, and Turkey. 

“We are extremely proud of our Ph.D. students, recent Ph.D. alumni, and postdocs and all of their accomplishments,” said Magnus Egerstedt, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “We wish them all of the very best at their new university homes and in all that they choose to pursue in the future.” 

In a world that needs the expertise of engineering and science faculty more than ever, here are ten new additions to academia, all hailing from the Georgia Tech School of ECE. 

Abdullah Alamri

Abdullah Alamri graduated with his Ph.D. in spring 2020 after working in the Power Systems Control and Automation Laboratory since 2015. He started working this summer as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Islamic University of Madinah, located in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. 

The title of Alamri’s thesis is “Reliability Analysis Methods for Power Systems with Substantial Penetration of Renewable Generating Resources.” Focused on reliability and generation adequacy of present-day power systems, Alamri’s thesis developed reliability assessment models of power systems with wind farms and/or solar farms. The models provide probabilistic descriptions of wind farm/solar farm electric power output, and three different methods for computing the generated power probability distribution function of a wind farm or a solar farm were proposed and implemented. 

Alamri was advised by A.P. Sakis Meliopoulos, who holds the Georgia Power Distinguished Professorship in ECE. Meliopoulos said that Alamri's work is fundamental in understanding and quantifying the uncertainty associated with variable, or non-controllable, power generation, such as wind and solar. “As the penetration levels of wind and solar into modern power systems increase, the reliability and associated costs for maintaining a certain reliability level are greatly affected,” Meliopoulos said. “Mr. Alamri’s work provided rigorous mathematical models and computational procedures to quantify the reliability of the system and enable optimization of planning strategies for modern systems.”

Ningyuan Cao

Ningyuan Cao graduated with his Ph.D. in summer 2020 after working in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Laboratory since 2015. In fall 2021, he will join the Department of ECE at George Washington University as an assistant professor. The university is located in Washington, D.C. 

The title of Cao’s thesis is “Circuit and Algorithm Design to Enable Edge Intelligence.” His work aims to bridge the gap between Internet of Things (IoT) intelligence and hardware constraints via technical innovations. In particular, Cao aims to enhance intelligence, robustness, and trust of the human-IoT eco-system via circuit/algorithm co-design. His research has been highlighted in a number of technical media articles including EE Times and Wired.  

Cao was advised by ECE Professor Arijit Raychowdhury, who said that Cao will be an excellent researcher and will succeed in academia. “Ningyuan is curious, eager to work on new problems, but doesn’t compromise on rigor,” Raychowdhury said. “He has been interfacing with a number of semiconductor companies as a part of his graduate work, and I am sure that it has taught him to be careful and successful in selecting problems that will have an impact.”

Adam Charles

Adam Charles graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE in 2015 and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University in New Jersey. He began working as an assistant professor this summer at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, located in Baltimore, Maryland.

The title of Charles’ thesis is “Dynamics and Correlations in Sparse Signal Acquisition.” Many advances in technology over the past few decades, such as in robotics, medical devices, and scientific analysis, have relied on the increasing ability to mathematically describe and exploit the intrinsic relationships that exist in data collection. This work bridges the gap between two important data relationships: sparsity and dynamics. Sparsity is the concept that a large, complex dataset admits a simple mathematical representation with a small number of independent features, while dynamics is the smooth evolution of our world through time that creates regularities in sequential data-points. Charles’ resulting algorithms and theory have broad usage in practical applications, including improving the resolution of airborne imaging systems, algorithmic advances that improved on the state-of-the-art for tracking objects in complex temporal data, and theoretical explorations on the computations that can be performed by ever-pervasive recurrent neural network models.

Charles was advised by ECE Professor Christopher Rozell. He said that Charles made innovative technical contributions, focused on activities to develop himself professionally, and invested in collaborative relationships with his colleagues to advance everyone’s work. “This foundation served Adam well as he broadened his skillset in his postdoc work to be uniquely positioned to address some of the most pressing problems at the intersection of neuroengineering and data science,” Rozell said. “It was no surprise that he was very successful on the job market and is embarking now to start his own lab in one of the best environments in the world for his research area. I couldn’t be more proud of Adam, and I am excited to see the way he leads our field over the next generation.”

Thinh Doan

Thinh Doan recently completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with both ECE and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). Doan joined the Bradley Department of ECE at Virginia Tech this fall, where he is an assistant professor. 

Doan earned his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018, and shortly afterwards, he came to Georgia Tech to do postdoctoral work on how multiple agents can collaboratively learn how to behave in their environment when communication between them is contained. This work is a mix of optimization, control, and communications.

Doan was advised by Justin Romberg, the Schlumberger Professor of ECE, and by Siva Theja Maguluri and Ganghui (George) Lan, assistant professor and professor respectively in ISyE. Romberg said that Doan’s time at Georgia Tech was a fantastic success. “In his two years here, Thinh not only published many papers in top applied mathematics journals and computer science conferences, he was also a tremendous mentor to my graduate students in ECE,” Romberg said. “He will make an excellent faculty member.”

Felipe A. Larrain

Felipe Larrain is graduating with his Ph.D. this summer after working in the Kippelen Research Group since 2014. This fall, he joined the Energy and Environmental Engineering Department as an assistant professor at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, located in Santiago, Chile.

The title of Larrain’s thesis is “Physics and Engineering of Organic Solar Cells: Electrical P-type Doping with Phosphomolybdic Acid.” The objective of Larrain’s proposed research was to simplify the fabrication of organic solar cells and limit their environmental impact by optimizing a new electrical doping mechanism. The solution-based electrical doping technique leads to a dramatic simplification of the device architecture of organic solar cells, decreasing the device fabrication cost while keeping the promise for roll-to-roll, large-area, and high throughput manufacturing.

Larrain was advised by Bernard Kippelen, who holds the Joseph M. Pettit Professorship in ECE. “I am extremely thankful to Felipe for his contributions to our research group during his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and am delighted that he has decided to select an academic career and become a scholar,” Kippelen said. “I am convinced that he will have an incredible impact on future generations of students, especially Latino students.”

Barry Muldrey

Barry Muldrey graduated with his Ph.D. in summer 2019 after working in the Low-power, Adaptive, and Resilient Systems Laboratory and then conducted postdoctoral research in the Integrated Computational Electronics Laboratory. He joined the Department of ECE at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi this fall as an assistant professor. 

The title of Muldrey’s thesis is “Algorithms for Post-Silicon Validation and Debug of Radio-Frequency, Analog, and Mixed-Signal Circuits and Systems.” The problem of validating and verifying the correctness of analog/RF circuits and systems is of critical importance due to their widespread deployment in sensing, control, and communication applications. Novel machine-learning assisted algorithms were developed for automatically modeling and validating behaviors of physical designs across the global space of possible excitations to such systems. A key contribution in Muldrey’s thesis was developing the ability to diagnose design inconsistencies (or “bugs”) down to individual modules to enable rapid design debug and yield ramp-up.

Muldrey was advised by ECE Professor Abhijit Chatterjee for his doctorate and collaborated with ECE Professor Jennifer Hasler on postdoctoral work in her lab. Between Hasler and Chatterjee, they have 11 Ph.D. graduates who are engineering faculty members. “Barry was always looking beyond horizons to push his abilities in so many domains; he is multi-faceted and multi-talented,” Chatterjee said. “It is a great accomplishment for him to get the academic position he always wanted. He is well-positioned to excel in so many areas, and I wish all the best to Barry.”

Nader Sehatbaksh

Nader Sehatbaksh is graduating with his Ph.D. this summer after working in the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Laboratory since 2014. He joined the Department of ECE at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) this fall as an assistant professor.

The title of Sehatbaksh’s thesis is “Leveraging Side-Channel Signals for Security and Trust.” His research is focused on finding new methods to discover, model, and mitigate unintentional information leakage, known as side-channels, from modern computers. His work aims to leverage side-channel signals for useful purposes–like profiling, intrusion detection, and establishing trust–to improve the security and/or performance of resource-constrained devices such as embedded and cyber-physical systems.

Sehatbaksh was co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Alenka Zajic and Computer Science Professor Milos Prvulovic. Zajic noted that faculty positions at schools like UCLA, a top 20 institution in the United States, are highly competitive even in regular years. “Such faculty positions were exceptionally scarce during COVID-19, when most schools have frozen hiring,” Zajic said. “Securing this position is a testament to Nader’s exceptional research accomplishments and other academic achievements, and also to the great training he obtained at Georgia Tech.”

Beren Semiz  

Beren Semiz is graduating with her Ph.D. this summer after working in the Inan Research Lab since 2016. She begins her career as an assistant professor this fall in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) at Koc University, located in Istanbul, Turkey. 

The title of Semiz’s thesis is “Digital Biomarker Discovery for Non-Invasive Health Monitoring with Acoustic and Vibration Signals.” There is a compelling need for novel modalities which can employ continuous and non-invasive health monitoring outside the physical confines of the clinic. Consequently, there is a new emerging class of biomarkers, digital biomarkers, which are measures collected through connected digital tools, generally across multiple layers of hardware and software. Semiz’s work in this area proposes the use of wearable acoustic and vibration measurements to derive digital biomarkers, which can be used together with existing medical information to assist in clinical decisions.

Semiz was advised by ECE Associate Professor Omer Inan, who said that being hired as an assistant professor at Koc University is impressive and demonstrates how highly her research activities and plans are regarded internationally. It is a leading Turkish university and was the highest ranked university in Turkey in 2018, according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “Beren has conducted highly innovative and exciting research while here in my group at Georgia Tech, bridging the disciplines of acoustics and vibration measurements from the body and digital health,” Inan said. “I am confident that she will be a successful independent PI at Koc, and will allow their Department of EEE and College of Engineering new opportunities to collaborate with medical schools and hospitals in Istanbul, addressing some of the most pressing health challenges facing the world today.”

Sahil Shah 

Sahil Shah graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE in 2018 and is currently a postdoctoral associate at Caltech in Pasadena, California. He will begin working as an assistant professor in spring 2021 in the Department of ECE at the University of Maryland at College Park.

The title of Shah’s thesis is “Low-Power Computation using FPAA for Wearable Devices.” His thesis presented foundational work demonstrating multiple low-energy system applications, particularly directions in embedded machine learning. The application of this work could potentially transform a number of portable and wearable devices, including medical devices. Shah’s work proved that these applications were shown to be robust to environmental factors, such as temperature fluctuations. He also developed techniques to self-repair these approaches as they were being used.

Shah was advised by ECE Professor Jennifer Hasler, who said that Shah has a bright future ahead of him in academia and in his particular field. Nine of her Ph.D. graduates hold tenured engineering faculty positions, and Shah is now the tenth to enter academia from her group. “Sahil’s excellent accomplishments both in teaching and research will continue to enable him to make a great impact as a faculty member at the University of Maryland, particularly in the area of wearable personal and medical devices,” Hasler said.

Swamit Tannu

Swamit Tannu has worked in the Memory Systems Lab since 2014 and will graduate with his Ph.D. in ECE during fall 2020. In spring 2021, he will begin his career as an assistant professor in the School of Computer, Data, and Information Sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

The title of Tannu’s thesis is “Compiler and Runtime Support for Near-term Quantum Computers.” His thesis work looks at software techniques to improve the fidelity of near-term quantum computers. It also looks at cryogenic processor and cryogenic memory systems for designing scalable quantum computers.

Tannu was advised by ECE Professor Moinuddin Qureshi, who said that Tannu is the third student from the Memory Systems Lab who is headed to academia. His past ECE advisees in academia are Jian Huang at the Department of ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Prashant Nair at the Department of ECE at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. “I am super proud of all of Swamit’s accomplishments, including him joining the University of Wisconsin, which is considered one of the strongest CS departments,” Qureshi said. “Swamit has been an incredible student, who chartered his own path and made strong research contributions in the emerging area of Quantum Computing. He also has a natural flair for teaching and mentorship, making him ideal for academia.”

Living cells are equipped with highly versatile built-in toolkits of DNA, RNA, and proteins for molecular communication, computing, storage, and sensing/actuation in response to environmental stimuli. Synthetic biology has been remarkably successful in developing engineered living cells by harnessing the same biological toolkits with enhanced natural functions or new human-defined functions. 

According to Hua Wang, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the project PI, these engineered cells can potentially serve as a “biological frontend” layer that naturally interfaces with the environment and acts as biosensors/actuators, molecular computing platforms, and molecular memory. In parallel, with decades of unprecedented technological advances, semiconductor technologies, such as Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits (ICs), can be employed as a “semiconductor backend” layer to interface with the living cell “biological frontend” layer for a wide variety of real-time control, communication, and computation functionalities.

“This project aims to advance the science and develop a first proof-of-concept programmable living nano-bioelectronic system that harnesses both the exquisite synthetic functionalities of engineered bacteria and the full functionalities of the ultra-low-power CMOS integrated circuit chips,” Wang said.

To develop this system, various bacteria strains will be engineered to perform wide-spectrum chemical sensing, such as heavy metal detections, in-bacteria DNA-based storage of analog/digital information, and molecular computation and encoding. CMOS IC chips with on-chip pixelated massively paralleled arrays will also be developed to provide real-time two-way, multi-modal interfaces with the living bacteria, which will read stored sensory information from the bacteria and write control signals to reprogram the living bacteria sensors. The bacteria strains and CMOS ICs will then be packaged together in 3D-printed microfluidics structures.

To address the multi-disciplinary aspects of this project, Wang is teaming with Tim Lu, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Faramarz Fekri, a Georgia Tech ECE professor; and Brian Hammer, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. Their roles are as follows:

• Wang and his team in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS) will lead the development of the multi-modal CMOS nano-electronics array IC chips for a two-way bacteria-nanoelectronics interface, as well as the packaging and integration of the hybrid programmable nano-bioelectronic system.

• Lu and the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT will lead the development of synthetic bacteria strains that monitor important analytes, such as chemicals and pollutants, and convert these into analog and digital signals for memory and signal transduction. They will interface with the outside world using convenient optical and/or electrical interfaces. 

“Engineered cells provide a natural interface with the living world, and will enable entirely new applications when paired with synergistic electronic systems that can compute and transmit environmental and health information beyond what biology can do on its own,” Lu said.

• Fekri and his Sensing, Processing, and Communication (SPC) Research Lab at Georgia Tech will lead the efforts on bio-computing, as well as signal coding for reliable storage. He will use a stochastic computing framework for computation using cells and will develop data-driven analog code designs for the in-bacteria DNA storage.

Nature is not purely digital and replicating the deterministic digital circuitries in biology is highly complex, according to Fekri. “Instead, we propose to use stochastic computing, which will explore the probabilistic nature of biology for computation,” he said. “Our intent is to demonstrate that bacterial cells engineered with genetically encoded logic gates can be exploited as a platform for stochastic bio-computing.”

• Hammer, from Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, will provide support and consultation on related biological experimentation and hybrid system integration.

The target application of this system is to create an in-field living nano-bioelectronic sensor for environment monitoring and healthcare, according to Wang. “The project has potentials for long-term, broader impacts on basic science and technology,” he said. “It brings together expertise from synthetic biology, hybrid bioelectronics, integrated packaging, information theory, and computing in a very unique way to further our university research and education.”

Note: This research is, in part, funded by the U.S. Government. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.

Living cells are equipped with highly versatile built-in toolkits of DNA, RNA, and proteins for molecular communication, computing, storage, and sensing/actuation in response to environmental stimuli. Synthetic biology has been remarkably successful in developing engineered living cells by harnessing the same biological toolkits with enhanced natural functions or new human-defined functions. 

According to Hua Wang, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the project PI, these engineered cells can potentially serve as a “biological frontend” layer that naturally interfaces with the environment and acts as biosensors/actuators, molecular computing platforms, and molecular memory. In parallel, with decades of unprecedented technological advances, semiconductor technologies, such as Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits (ICs), can be employed as a “semiconductor backend” layer to interface with the living cell “biological frontend” layer for a wide variety of real-time control, communication, and computation functionalities.

“This project aims to advance the science and develop a first proof-of-concept programmable living nano-bioelectronic system that harnesses both the exquisite synthetic functionalities of engineered bacteria and the full functionalities of the ultra-low-power CMOS integrated circuit chips,” Wang said.

To develop this system, various bacteria strains will be engineered to perform wide-spectrum chemical sensing, such as heavy metal detections, in-bacteria DNA-based storage of analog/digital information, and molecular computation and encoding. CMOS IC chips with on-chip pixelated massively paralleled arrays will also be developed to provide real-time two-way, multi-modal interfaces with the living bacteria, which will read stored sensory information from the bacteria and write control signals to reprogram the living bacteria sensors. The bacteria strains and CMOS ICs will then be packaged together in 3D-printed microfluidics structures.

To address the multi-disciplinary aspects of this project, Wang is teaming with Tim Lu, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Faramarz Fekri, a Georgia Tech ECE professor; and Brian Hammer, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. Their roles are as follows:

• Wang and his team in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS) will lead the development of the multi-modal CMOS nano-electronics array IC chips for a two-way bacteria-nanoelectronics interface, as well as the packaging and integration of the hybrid programmable nano-bioelectronic system.

• Lu and the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT will lead the development of synthetic bacteria strains that monitor important analytes, such as chemicals and pollutants, and convert these into analog and digital signals for memory and signal transduction. They will interface with the outside world using convenient optical and/or electrical interfaces. 

“Engineered cells provide a natural interface with the living world, and will enable entirely new applications when paired with synergistic electronic systems that can compute and transmit environmental and health information beyond what biology can do on its own,” Lu said.

• Fekri and his Sensing, Processing, and Communication (SPC) Research Lab at Georgia Tech will lead the efforts on bio-computing, as well as signal coding for reliable storage. He will use a stochastic computing framework for computation using cells and will develop data-driven analog code designs for the in-bacteria DNA storage.

Nature is not purely digital and replicating the deterministic digital circuitries in biology is highly complex, according to Fekri. “Instead, we propose to use stochastic computing, which will explore the probabilistic nature of biology for computation,” he said. “Our intent is to demonstrate that bacterial cells engineered with genetically encoded logic gates can be exploited as a platform for stochastic bio-computing.”

• Hammer, from Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, will provide support and consultation on related biological experimentation and hybrid system integration.

The target application of this system is to create an in-field living nano-bioelectronic sensor for environment monitoring and healthcare, according to Wang. “The project has potentials for long-term, broader impacts on basic science and technology,” he said. “It brings together expertise from synthetic biology, hybrid bioelectronics, integrated packaging, information theory, and computing in a very unique way to further our university research and education.”

Note: This research is, in part, funded by the U.S. Government. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.

The QFA supports key professors and their research, with the goal of strengthening Qualcomm’s engagement with faculty who also play a key role in Qualcomm’s recruiting of top graduate students.

There is a rapidly growing need for high-performance RF/mm-Wave front-end circuits and transceiver systems to address the numerous 5G and Beyond 5G wireless communications and sensing applications. Wang's research group has pioneered a variety of novel circuit topologies and system architectures that are agnostic to process technology platforms and can radically improve the bandwidth, energy-efficiency, and robustness of RF/mm-Wave circuits and systems. Wang's research has led to multiple papers in premier venues, including the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC).

An associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Wang leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-Systems (GEMS) Lab. His research interests include innovating analog, RF, and mm-Wave integrated circuits and hybrid systems for wireless communications, sensing, and bioelectronics applications.

Wang is also the recipient of the 2020 DARPA Director's Fellowship, 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award, 2017 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He held the Georgia Tech ECE Demetrius T. Paris Professorship from 2014 to 2018. 

Wang has authored or co-authored over 170 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. His GEMS research group has won multiple academic awards and best paper awards, including the 2019 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar, the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium Best Student Paper Awards (2014, 2016, and 2018), the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) Outstanding Student Paper Awards (2015, 2018, and 2019), the IEEE CICC Best Conference Paper Award (2017), the 2016 IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award, and the IEEE SENSORS Best Live Demo Award (2016).

In 2018, Wang won the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), which aims to identify and engage rising stars in young researchers who are motivated to pursue high-risk, high-reward fundamental research by pairing them with DARPA program managers and providing them with funding for a two-year period. 

DARPA YFA winners are chosen in a wide range of research areas from engineering, physics, and chemistry to computer science and social science. The long-term goal of the DARPA YFA program is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who will focus a significant portion of their career on U.S. Department of Defense and national security issues.

At the end of the initial two-year period, DARPA YFA awardees with exceptional technical achievements and leadership will be selected for the highly competitive DARPA Director’s Fellowship that provides additional funding and support for a third year to extend their risk-taking research explorations.

Wang was selected for his Director’s Fellowship by the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office that develops next-generation intelligent microelectronics systems and components. His research focuses on inventing fundamental circuit topologies and system architectures that will lead to a new class of load modulation power amplifiers with an unprecedented combination of bandwidth, energy efficiency, output power, and linearity. These fundamental amplifier topologies will be agnostic to process technologies and will eventually enable true “common-module front-ends” for reconfigurable transmitters and MIMO systems with mm-Wave to THz “full-spectrum access” for wireless communication, radar, imaging, and spectrum sensing applications.

"DARPA has a long history of making pivot investment in breakthrough innovations, not only in game-changing defense capabilities but also foundational technologies for our modern civilian society, such as the internet and miniaturized GPS receivers,” says Wang. “It is a great honor to be recognized by DARPA for my team’s research. Our mission is to invent new circuits and systems by exploring fundamental topologies. When we remove the conventional boundaries between devices, circuits, and electromagnetics, and consider everything holistically, interesting innovations will happen.”

As a member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2012, Wang is currently an associate professor and leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab. He has received multiple prestigious academic awards, including the ECE Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship 2014-2018, IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2017, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2016, National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, Roger P. Webb ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2015, and Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, as well as many best paper awards in the field of solid-state circuits, systems, and microwave engineering. Wang is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society for 2018 and 2019.

For this year, courses taught during the calendar year 2019 were considered. The criteria for selection for the award included a student response rate of 85% and above. CIOS scores were based on the sum of three scale items: (#16) instructor’s respect and concern for students; (#17) instructor’s level of enthusiasm about teaching the course; and (#18) instructor’s ability to stimulate interest in the subject matter.

Lim was recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 6133: Physical Design Automation of VLSI Systems. He taught this course to 76 graduate students during spring 2019. This course focuses on various design automation problems in the physical design process of VLSI circuits. It also covers issues such as logic partitioning, floorplanning, global routing, detailed routing, compaction, and performance-driven layout. 

Lim is a professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2001. He leads the Georgia Tech Computer-Aided Design Lab. 

Rozell was recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 8801: Are You Thinking of Becoming a Academic? during fall 2019. He taught this course to 67 graduate students, combined from all four sections, during fall 2019. This course is cross-listed with the Schools of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE), Industrial and Systems Engineering(ISyE), and Mechanical Engineering. The course focuses on seeking positions at top tier research universities and covering topics such as the application and interview process, building and funding research groups, and mentorship. 

Rozell is a professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2008. He leads the Sensory Information Processing Lab.

Saltaformaggio was recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 4894 A: Introduction to Malware Reverse Engineering. He taught this course to 49 students during spring 2019. This course couples the instruction of fundamental malware dissection principles with hands-on reverse engineering projects which investigate realistic malware samples and utilize cutting-edge technologies. The students follow dedicated lab assignments which progressively introduce new and important challenges that a reverse engineer might encounter when analyzing modern malware – an increasingly in-demand skill set for both graduate research or employment with private and government forensics labs.

Saltaformaggio is an assistant professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2017. He leads the Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, also known as the CyFI Lab.

Zajic was also recognized for her outstanding teaching in ECE 8801/CHBE 8801/ISYE 8811: Are You Thinking of Becoming a Academic? during fall 2018. She taught this course to 32 graduate students from ChBE, ISyE, and ECE. The course focuses on seeking positions at top tier research universities and covering topics such as the application and interview process, building and funding research groups, and mentorship.

Zajic is an associate professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2012. She leads the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Laboratory. 

Below is a list of the eight awardees and two honorable mentions.

Louise Zhuang is an electrical engineering senior who is graduating this May, and she plans to go to Stanford University to pursue her Ph.D. this fall. Her research advisor is Wayne Daley, who is a principal research engineer in the Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

Megha Tippur is an electrical engineering senior who is graduating this May, and she plans to pursue a Ph.D. this fall. Her research advisors at Georgia Tech are ECE Professor Rob Butera and Frank Hammond, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Cynthia Sung, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kenneth Shaw is a computer engineering senior who is graduating this May, and he plans to pursue a M.S. degree in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. His research advisors are Sonya Chernova, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, and ECE Associate Professor Morris Cohen as part of the Vertically Integrated Projects Program.

Robert (Max) Dabagia is a computer engineering senior who is graduating this May, and he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science at Georgia Tech. His research advisor is Eva Dyer, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. 

Joanne Truong is a first year ECE Ph.D. student in robotics, and she is co-advised by Sonia Chernova and Dhruv Batra, both associate professors in the School of Interactive Computing. Truong graduated magna cum laude in 2019 from Northeastern University with her bachelor of science degree in computer engineering. 

Nelson Sepulveda is a first year ECE Ph.D. student, and he is advised by ECE Professor John Cressler. Sepulveda graduated in 2019 with his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.

Asim Gazi is a second year ECE Ph.D. student, and he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Omer Inan. Gazi graduated in 2018 with his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas.

David Richardson is a second year ECE Ph.D. student, and he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Morris Cohen. Richardson graduated in 2019 with his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech.

Dmitry Shribak and Gregory Junek, who are both ECE Ph.D. students, received Honorable Mentions.

To learn more about the NSF GRFP, please visit the program website

Since last August, Gurses has worked as a researcher in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, which is led by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang. His research project involves working on a reconfigurable rat-race coupler for mm-wave and sub-THz applications.

As modern wireless communications continuously increase in speed and performance, operating at higher frequencies has become a requirement and a clear trend for all wireless devices and systems. Simultaneously, multi-band high-frequency communications and advancements in adaptive radio gave rise to the implementation of frequency reconfigurability in integrated devices. 

Combining the benefits of both high-frequency operation and frequency reconfigurability, Gurses is working on a design methodology to devise frequency-reconfigurable rat-race hybrid couplers in the mm-wave/sub-THz, or >100 GHz, range. This project proves itself to be the first implementation of reconfigurable couplers on silicon at these frequencies. Therefore, the proposed methodology will be a crucial element for the development of future adaptive wireless systems operating at sub-THz frequencies to address beyond-5G/6G challenges.

Junek received his B.S. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and he is currently a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang. Junk joined the GEMS Lab in fall 2018, and his past awards include the 2018 Georgia Tech Presidential Fellowship and Best Undergraduate Poster Award (2nd Place) at the 2017 SRC TECHCON conference, held annually in Austin, Texas.

Junek’s research takes place at the interface of biology, engineering, computer science, and physical sciences and addresses challenges in healthcare, precision medicine, and fundamental biological sciences. His research aims to create seamless multi-modal bidirectional bio-electronic interfaces by combining the abilities of modern nanotechnology fabrication processes with the unprecedented computational capabilities and versatile sensing/actuation modalities of CMOS electronics.

The mission of The National GEM Consortium is to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups (African-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanic Americans) at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. To learn more about the GEM fellowship, please visit http://www.gemfellowship.org.

This predoctoral achievement award is for Wang's Ph.D. research on “mm-Wave broadband linear active load modulation power amplifier architectures with deep PBO efficiency enhancement.” The goal of his research is to radically advance the modulation performance of mm-Wave power amplifiers beyond the state-of-the-art to address beyond-5G and next-generation wireless communication applications.

Wang is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang. He received his B.Sc. from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. His past awards include First Prize, Shanghai Undergraduate Mathematical Competition (China); the Tencent Innovation Scholarship (Fudan University); the Georgia Tech ECE Graduate Fellowship; the Analog Devices, Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2017; and the 2018 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Best Student Paper Award.

Held July 8-12 in San Antonio, Texas, the IEEE NSREC is the largest international forum for the presentation of advances in radiation effects in electronic devices, circuits, and systems. This is the second year in a row that members from this joint research project between Georgia Tech and NRL have received this award, which speaks to the interest of the scientific community in the work being done by these groups. 

Three students, Adrian Ildefonso, George Tzintzarov, and Delgermaa Nergui, are co-authors of this publication. They are all Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where they are advised by John D. Cressler, the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics. Cressler is also a co-author of this publication and leads the SiGe Devices and Circuits Group.

The paper, “New Approach for Pulsed-Laser Single-Event Effects Testing That Mimics Heavy-Ion Charge Deposition,” was authored by Joel M. Hales in collaboration with A. Khachatrian, S. Buchner, J. H. Warner, A. Ildefonso, G. N. Tzintzarov, D. Nergui, D. M. Monahan, S. D. LaLumondiere, B. Lotshaw, J. D. Cressler, and D. McMorrow. Hales is also a Georgia Tech alumnus, where received his bachelor of science degree in Physics. After completing his Ph.D., he served as a principal research scientist in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, where he worked in Joseph W. Perry’s research group. This work explores the use of pulsed lasers to emulate the effects of the space environment on electronic devices, circuits, and systems. A full-length journal paper based on this conference presentation has already been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and will be published in a special issue of the journal in January.

One of the big questions in the field of radiation effects is: “How can we best reproduce the effects of energized particles on electronics by using pulsed lasers?” When energized particles, such as protons or ions, traverse electronic components, they deposit charge, which can generate voltage and current glitches. These glitches have impacted the operation of several aircraft and spacecraft in the past. 

To ensure that these effects are not catastrophic, engineers perform extensive testing of electronics at particle accelerators. These facilities, however, are fairly expensive and can have limited availability. Thus, pulsed lasers have emerged as a complementary tool to accelerator testing, as they are more accessible and can provide more information than is attainable through traditional accelerator test campaigns. 

This paper introduces a novel optical approach to better emulate the effects of heavy ions on electronics using pulsed lasers. This approach uses a conical lens, known as an Axicon, in place of traditional spherical lenses to focus the laser beam. The result is a charge deposition profile that better approximates the one produced by an energized particle. This new experimental technique will not only impact pulsed laser experiments; it also has potential impacts for how qualification of space components is performed.

Aside from numerous technical accomplishments, this collaboration between NRL and Cressler’s research team at Georgia Tech School of ECE has provided an excellent mentorship opportunity for his graduate students. Throughout the years, Cressler’s students have worked closely with established researchers in the field of radiation effects. These researchers have served as mentors to his students, guiding them through the process of designing experiments to take advantage of the unique capabilities offered by NRL.

Photo caption: Pictured left to right are Adrian Ildefonso, John Cressler, Delgermaa Nergui, and George Tzintzarov. Cressler leads the SiGe Devices and Circuits Group, and he advises Ildefonso, Nergui, and Tzintzarov, who are Ph.D. students in the group.

Ying is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He works in the SiGe Devices and Circuits Group, where he is advised by John D. Cressler, ECE’s Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics. 

Ying's award-winning paper, “DC and RF Variability of SiGe HBTs Operating Down to Deep Cryogenic Temperatures,” was co-authored with J.W. Teng, G.N. Tzintzarov, A.P. Omprakash, S.G. Rao, U. Raghunathan, A. Ildefonso, and S. Fernandez—all students in the SiGe Devices and Circuits Group–and Cressler. This work studies the effect of temperature on the variability of silicon germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) down to a cryogenic temperature of 7 K (-266 °C).

For cryogenic applications such as quantum computing, it is desirable to operate electronics near the physical qubit. The further the qubit sits from the processing circuits, the more noise gets introduced in between them, and the signal to noise ratio degrades. However, bringing the electronics closer to the qubit is challenging, because the qubit is situated at cryogenic temperatures as low as a few tens of millikelvin. 

Because of those conditions, extensive testing and modeling is needed for successful design of any circuits and systems at those temperatures. Though SiGe HBTs have been a good candidate for cryogenic circuits, potential concerns for SiGe HBTs need to be mitigated, one of which is the increasing variability. This work quantifies the variability through measurement data and is the first work to report such data. The information and guidelines provided in this work can lead to more consistent circuit performance and higher yield for cryogenic circuits.

A rising sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, Yadav has been working as an undergraduate researcher during his first year at Georgia Tech. His advisor is J. Stevenson Kenney, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Yadov’s design was similar to power amplifiers used in transmitters for cellular base stations.

IMS is the flagship conference of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society with 8,000 attendees from around the world. It is particularly notable that Yadov was competing for this award against seniors and graduate students from top institutions in the field.

Cheng and Nguyen are both Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where they work in the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Lab (EMC^2). They are co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Alenka Zajic and Milos Prvulovic, a professor in the School of Computer Science.

Cheng and Nguyen will be recognized for their invention, “Antenna-less RFID Tag,” which they developed with Drs. Zajic and Prvulovic. It was filed as Georgia Tech invention disclosure GTRC-7744 on November 19, 2017 and then filed as U.S. Patent and Trademark Office provisional patent 62/588,551 on November 20, 2017. The antenna-less RFID tag requires neither a tag antenna nor RF front-end circuits, thus leading to a system that does not have limitations on the frequency at which a tag can operate, can be reprogrammed to perform different functions such as emitting static bits or having dynamic communication, and overall leads to a much simpler, smaller, and more reliable system. 

This technology is based on toggling electronic inverters that switch between two impedance states that can be read using any RF interrogator and a backscatter channel, which allows the information obtained by the RFID tag to be collected without the use of an antenna. This tag has the capability to operate at any frequency and can store a large number of static bits needed for asset identification and tracking, or it can be used for high data rate communication.

Additionally, the technology enables easy programming of the tag such that existing hardware such as FPGAs can be programmed to behave as RFID tags. Potential commercial applications for this technology include RFID communications, supply chain management, asset tracking, and passport identification.

The title of Jung’s award-winning paper is “A 1.2 V Single Supply Hybrid Current-/Voltage-Mode Three-Way Digital Doherty PA with Built-In Large-Signal Phase Compensation Achieving Less-Than 5 AM-PM.” The paper presents a new Doherty power amplifier architecture that improves large-signal linearity and achieves efficiency enhancement at deep power back-off. This technique will help preserve signal integrity and maintain high power efficiency in high data-rate wireless communication. 

Jung's coauthors on the paper are Jongseok Park, Sensen Li, Tzu-Yuan Huang, Haun Zhao, and his Ph.D. advisor Hua Wang, who is an ECE associate professor and the GEMS Lab director.

Zajic was chosen for this honor for her sustained technical contributions to wireless chip-to-chip communications and electromagnetic compatibility. She joined the ECE faculty in 2012 and leads the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Group. 

Zajic’s research is focused on studying propagation in challenging environments such as vehicle-to-vehicle wireless radio communications, underwater acoustic communications, and inside-a-processor-chip communications. Also a highly regarded teacher, she was chosen as the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Junior Teacher Award, an honor determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class. 

Zajic has served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and as an executive editor for Wiley’s Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. From 2015-2017, she served as chair of the Atlanta Chapter of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society/Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. In 2016, under her leadership, the Atlanta Chapter of IEEE AP-S/MTT-S received an Outstanding Chapter Award.

The Paul Baran Young Scholar Award recognizes young scientists and engineers who are younger than 28 years old and have demonstrated exceptional capability and potential. Nominated by academic and faculty mentors, the Young Scholars are selected worldwide with only four awardees every year, which is the highest honor for a young scholar. 

Huang is the first Georgia Tech Ph.D. student to receive this honor since this awards program was established in 2008.Their innovations touch every part of our connected world, from fiber optics and quantum communications to machine learning, localization, 5G, and information theory. Huang was selected for his academic achievements and leadership in the field of communications and information science. He and his advisor, ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang, will attend the award ceremony to be held May 16-17, 2019 at Stanford University.

Huang is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Microsystem Lab, which is led by Wang. Huang’s research focuses on “New MIMO Transceiver Architecture for Next-Generation Ultra-Low-Latency Applications.” This technology can potentially revolutionize next-generation mm-Wave communication, sensing, and optical-fiber wireless communication for 5G, as well as future 6G and ultimately the "Tactile Internet.” The Tactile Internet is described as “a network or network of networks for remotely accessing, perceiving, manipulating, or controlling real or virtual objects or processes in perceived real time by humans or machines.” 

Huang’s research is supported in part by Wang's DARPA Young Faculty Award; the DARPA MTO MIDAS program; the Georgia Tech Fiber-Wireless Integration and Networking Center; the Georgia Tech Center for Co-design of Chip, Package, System; and other industry sponsors.

Li is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He works in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang. 

Li’s research focuses on millimeter-wave and terahertz integrated circuit, antenna, and system designs for 5G wireless communication, radar, and hyperspectral imaging applications. He graduated with his B.Eng. with Highest Honors and his B.A. from Zhejiang University and has been a member of the GEMS Lab since Fall 2015.

This award recognizes graduate students who are in the early portion of their graduate studies and who have shown exceptional achievements and promise in the general field of integrated circuits and systems. Garay and Nguyen will be presented with these awards at the 2019 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, to be held February 17-21 in San Francisco, California. They are members of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS), where they are advised by Hua Wang.  

Garay’s Ph.D. research focuses on zero-power RF/mm-wave signal processing, multi-functional digital transmitter systems for next-generation radar and 5G wireless communications, and power generation for THz Internet of Things devices. He joined the GEMS Lab in 2015. He graduated with his B.S. degree in physics in 2009 and his B.S.E.E. degree in 2010 from Florida International University and his M.S.E.E. degree from the University of Florida in 2013. 

Nguyen’s Ph.D. research focuses on innovating circuits and systems architectures to resolve the unmet challenges of next generation mm-wave/THz technologies. He is working on addressing various emerging applications of this work to 5G, massive MIMO, radar, imaging, and spectroscopy. He joined the GEMS Lab in 2016. He graduated with his B.Eng. degree with First Class Honors from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2013.

A member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, Huang is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He conducts research for his Ph.D. thesis topic, "New MIMO System Architecture for Next-Generation (5G/beyond) Ultra-Low Latency Communication.” His Ph.D. advisor is ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang.

The IEEE SSCS Pre-Doctoral Achievement Award recognizes Huang's major research achievements in the field of RF/mm-Wave/THz integrated circuits and next-generation low-latency systems. He is also involved with a collaboration with ECE Professor Gee-Kung Chang's lab under the Fiber-Wireless Integration and Networking (FiWIN) Center for future low-latency fiber-wireless networks.

Pharmaceutical companies use cell-based assays, a combination of living cells and sensor electronics, to measure physiological changes in the cells. That data is used for high-throughput screening (HTS) during drug discovery. In this early phase of drug development, the goal is to identify target pathways and promising chemical compounds that could be developed further – and to eliminate those that are ineffective or toxic – by measuring the physiological responses of the cells to each compound. 

Phenotypic testing of thousands of candidate compounds, with the majority “failing early,” allows only the most promising ones to be further developed into drugs and maybe eventually to undergo clinical trials, where drug failure is much more costly. But most existing cell-based assays use electronic sensors that can only measure one physiological property at a time and cannot obtain holistic cellular responses. 

That’s where the new cellular sensing platform comes in. “The innovation of our technology is that we are able to leverage the advance of nano-electronic technologies to create cellular interfacing platforms with massively parallel pixels,” said Wang. “And within each pixel we can detect multiple physiological parameters from the same group of cells at the same time.” The experimental quad-modality chip features extracellular or intracellular potential recording, optical detection, cellular impedance measurement, and biphasic current stimulation. 

Wang said the new technology offers four advantages over existing platforms:

Multimodal sensing: The chip’s ability to record multiple parameters on the same cellular sample gives researchers the ability to comprehensively monitor complex cellular responses, uncover the correlations among those parameters and investigate how they may respond together when exposed to drugs. “Living cells are small but highly complex systems. Drug administration often results in multiple physiological changes, but this cannot be detected using conventional single-modal sensing,” said Wang.

Large field of view: The platform allows researchers to examine the behavior of cells in a large aggregate to see how they respond collectively at the tissue level.

Small spatial resolution: Not only can researchers look at cells at the tissue level, they could also examine them at single-cell or even sub-cellular resolution.

Low-cost platform: The new array platform is built on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, which is also used to build computer chips, and can be easily scaled up for mass production.

Wang’s team worked closely with Hee Cheol Cho, associate professor and the Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering, whose Heart Regeneration lab is part of the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. They used neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and cardiac fibroblasts to illustrate the multi-parametric cell profiling ability of the array for drug screening. The recent results were published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip on August 31, 2018. 

Monitoring cellular responses in multi-physical domains and holistic multi-parametric cellular profiling should also prove beneficial in screening out chemical compounds that could have harmful effects on certain organs, said Jong Seok Park, a post-doctoral fellow in Wang’s lab and a leading author of the study. Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market after discoveries that they had toxic effects on the heart or liver, for example. This platform should enable researchers to comprehensively test for organ toxicity and other side effects at the initial phases of drug discovery.  

The experimental chip may be useful for other applications, including personalized medicine – for example, testing cancer cells from a particular patient. “Patient to patient variation is huge, even with the same type of drug,” said Wang. The cellular interface array could be used to see which combination of existing drugs would give the best response and to find the optimum dose that is most effective with minimum toxicity to healthy cells. 

The chip is capable of actuation as well as sensing. In the future, Wang said that cellular data from the chip could be uploaded and processed, and based on that, commands for new actuation or data acquisition could be sent to the chip automatically and wirelessly. He envisions rooms and rooms containing culture chambers with millions of such chips in fully automated facilities, “just automatically doing new drug selection for us,” he said. 

Beyond these applications, Wang noted the scientific value of the research itself. Integrated circuits and nanoelectronics are some of the most sophisticated technology platforms created by humans. Living cells, on the other hand, are complex products produced through billions of years of natural selection and evolution. 

“The central theme of our research is how we can leverage the best platform created by nature with the best platform created by humans,” he said. “Can we let them work together to create hybrid systems that achieve capabilities beyond biology only or electronics only systems? The fundamental scientific question we are addressing is how we can let inorganic electronics better interface with organic living cells.” 

These researchers also participated in the related studies: Doohwan Jung, Adam Wang, Taiyun Chi, Sensen Li and Moez K. Aziz from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech; and Sandra I. Grijalva and Michael N. Sayegh from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and ECCS CCSS Program, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship grant numbers DGE-1148903 and DGE-1650044, Office of Naval Research, and Semiconductor Research Corporation SSB roadmap consortium. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

CITATION: Jong Seok Park, et al., “Multi-parametric cell profiling with a CMOS quad-modality cellular interfacing array for label-free fully automated drug screening,” (Lab Chip 2018). DOI: 10.1039/c8lc00156a

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Writer: Kenna Simmons

The attack, which was reported to software developers before it was publicized, took advantage of programming that was, ironically, designed to provide better security. The attack used intercepted electromagnetic signals from the phones that could have been analyzed using a small portable device costing less than a thousand dollars. Unlike earlier intercept attempts that required analyzing many logins, the “One & Done” attack was carried out by eavesdropping on just one decryption cycle.

“This is something that could be done at an airport to steal people’s information without arousing suspicion and makes the so-called ‘coffee shop attack’ much more realistic,” said Milos Prvulovic, associate chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science. “The designers of encryption software now have another issue that they need to take into account because continuous snooping over long periods of time would no longer be required to steal this information.”

The side channel attack is believed to be the first to retrieve the secret exponent of an encryption key in a modern version of OpenSSL without relying on the cache organization and/or timing. OpenSSL is a popular encryption program used for secure interactions on websites and for signature authentication. The attack showed that a single recording of a cryptography key trace was sufficient to break 2048 bits of a private RSA key. 

Results of the research, which was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) will be presented at the 27th USENIX Security Symposium August 16th in Baltimore.

After successfully attacking the phones and an embedded system board – which all used ARM processors – the researchers proposed a fix for the vulnerability, which was adopted in versions of the software made available in May.

Side channel attacks extract sensitive information from signals created by electronic activity within computing devices during normal operation. The signals include electromagnetic emanations created by current flows within the devices computational and power-delivery circuitry, variation in power consumption, and also sound, temperature and chassis potential variation. These emanations are very different from communications signals the devices are designed to produce.

In their demonstration, Prvulovic and collaborator Alenka Zajic listened in on two different Android phones using probes located near, but not touching the devices. In a real attack, signals could be received from phones or other mobile devices by antennas located beneath tables or hidden in nearby furniture. 

The “One & Done” attack analyzed signals in a relatively narrow (40 MHz wide) band around the phones’ processor clock frequencies, which are close to 1 GHz (1,000 MHz). The researchers took advantage of a uniformity in programming that had been designed to overcome earlier vulnerabilities involving variations in how the programs operate. 

“Any variation is essentially leaking information about what the program is doing, but the constancy allowed us to pinpoint where we needed to look,” said Prvulovic. “Once we got the attack to work, we were able to suggest a fix for it fairly quickly. Programmers need to understand that portions of the code that are working on secret bits need to be written in a very particular way to avoid having them leak.”

The researchers are now looking at other software that may have similar vulnerabilities, and expect to develop a program that would allow automated analysis of security vulnerabilities.

“Our goal is to automate this process so it can be used on any code,” said Zajic, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’d like to be able to identify portions of code that could be leaky and require a fix. Right now, finding these portions requires considerable expertise and manual examination.”

Side channel attacks are still relatively rare, but Prvulovic says the success of “One & Done” demonstrates an unexpected vulnerability. The availability of low-cost signal processing devices small enough to use in coffee shops or airports could make the attacks more practical.

“We now have relatively cheap and compact devices – smaller than a USB drive – that are capable of analyzing these signals,” said Prvulovic. “Ten years ago, the analysis of this signal would have taken days. Now it takes just seconds, and can be done anywhere – not just in a lab setting.”

Producers of mobile devices are becoming more aware of the need to protect electromagnetic signals of phones, tablets and laptops from interception by shielding their side channel emissions. Improving the software running on the devices is also important, but Prvulovic suggests that users of mobile devices must also play a security role.

“This is something that needs to be addressed at all levels,” he said. “A combination of factors – better hardware, better software and cautious computer hygiene – make you safer. You should not be paranoid about using your devices in public locations, but you should be cautious about accessing banking systems or plugging your device into unprotected USB chargers.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research involved Monjur M. Alam, Haider A. Khan, Moumita Dey, Nishith Sinha and Robert Callen, all of Georgia Tech.

This work has been supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grant 1563991 and by the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA LADS under contract FA8650-16-C-7620. The views and findings in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of NSF, DARPA or the AFRL.

CITATION: Monjur M. Alam, et. al., “One&Done: A Single-Decryption EM-Based Attack on OpenSSL’s Constant-Time Blinded RSA,” Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium.

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The IEEE RFIC is the premier integrated circuits conference focused exclusively on the latest developments in RF, Microwave, and Millimeter Wave Integrated Circuit technology and innovation.

Li’s award-winning paper is entitled "A 28GHz Packaged Chireix Transmitter with Direct On-Antenna Outphasing Load Modulation Achieving 56%/38% PA Efficiency at Peak/6dB Back-Off Output Power.” Joining Li as coauthors on the paper are present or past ECE Ph.D. students Taiyun Chi, Tzu-Yuan Huang, and Huy Thong Nguyen. ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang is also a co-author; he is the director of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Microsystem (GEMS) Lab and is the advisor for everyone on this research team. 

In this paper, the team proposed and demonstrated a packaged 28GHz Chireix outphasing transmitter (TX) for power amplifier (PA) efficiency enhancement at peak and back-off output power (PBO). It utilizes a novel, high-efficiency dual-feed loop antenna (DLA)-based non-isolating power combiner to realize direct on-antenna power combining, and more importantly, outphasing active load modulation. The proposed Chireix TX contains two phase-shifted sub-TXs simultaneously driving a DLA on package. The TX chips are implemented in a 45nm CMOS SOI process and integrated with the DLA by flip-chip packaging.

This Chireix outphasing TX design sets the new world record of energy efficiency among all reported silicon-based power amplifiers and transmitters in the K-band and Ka-band frequency range. This 28GHz TX system could replace many types of transmitters in wireless mobile devices, base stations, and infrastructure links in data centers, in particular for mm-Wave 5G MIMO applications.

Over the past several years, the GEMS team has been working on merging antenna and electronics to substantially boost energy and spectral efficiency of wireless front-end systems. Merging these two disciplines will enable researchers to break through many existing fundamental or practical limits and open a completely new paradigm for future wireless front-end designs. This paper is another proof-of-concept example of such a new design concept. 

The work described in this paper is sponsored by Intel Corporation and the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO).

Photo caption: Pictured (left to right) at the 2018 IEEE RFIC Student Best Paper Award Ceremony: Sensen Li (1st Author), Dr. Walid Ali-Ahmad (Facebook, Conference General Chair of 2018 IEEE RFIC), and ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang.

The new co-design technique allows simultaneous optimization of the millimeter wave antennas and electronics. The hybrid devices use conventional materials and integrated circuit (IC) technology, meaning no changes would be required to manufacture and package them. The co-design scheme allows fabrication of multiple transmitters and receivers on the same IC chip or the same package, potentially enabling multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems as well as boosting data rates and link diversity.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology presented their proof-of-concept antenna-based outphasing transmitter on June 11 at the 2018 Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) in Philadelphia. Their other antenna-electronics co-design work was published at the 2017 and 2018 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and multiple peer-reviewed IEEE journals. The Intel Corporation and U.S. Army Research Office sponsored the research.

“In this proof-of-example, our electronics and antenna were designed so that they can work together to achieve a unique on-antenna outphasing active load modulation capability that significantly enhances the efficiency of the entire transmitter,” said Hua Wang, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This system could replace many types of transmitters in wireless mobile devices, base stations and infrastructure links in data centers.”

Key to the new design is maintaining a high-energy efficiency regardless whether the device is operating at its peak or average output power. The efficiency of most conventional transmitters is high only at the peak power but drops substantially at low power levels, resulting in low efficiency when amplifying complex spectrally efficient modulations. Moreover, conventional transmitters often add the outputs from multiple electronics using lossy power combiner circuits, exacerbating the efficiency degradation.

“We are combining the output power though a dual-feed loop antenna, and by doing so with our innovation in the antenna and electronics, we can substantially improve the energy efficiency,” said Wang, who is the Demetrius T. Paris Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  “The innovation in this particular design is to merge the antenna and electronics to achieve the so-called outphasing operation that dynamically modulates and optimizes the output voltages and currents of power transistors, so that the millimeter wave transmitter maintains a high energy efficiency both at the peak and average power.”

Beyond energy efficiency, the co-design also facilitates spectrum efficiency by allowing more complex modulation protocols. That will enable transmission of a higher data rate within the fixed spectrum allocation that poses a significant challenge for 5G systems.

“Within the same channel bandwidth, the proposed transmitter can transmit six to ten times higher data rate,” Wang said. “Integrating the antenna gives us more degrees of freedom to explore design innovation, something that could not be done before.”

Sensen Li, a Georgia Tech graduate research assistant who received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2018 RFIC symposium, said the innovation resulted from bringing together two disciplines that have traditionally worked separately.

“We are merging the technologies of electronics and antennas, bringing these two disciplines together to break through limits,” he said. “These improvements could not be achieved by working on them independently. By taking advantage of this new co-design concept, we can further improve the performance of future wireless transmitters.”

The new designs have been implemented in 45-nanometer CMOS SOI IC devices and flip-chip packaged on high-frequency laminate boards, where testing has confirmed a minimum two-fold increase in energy efficiency, Wang said.

The antenna electronics co-design is enabled by exploring the unique nature of multi-feed antennas.

“An antenna structure with multiple feeds allows us to use multiple electronics to drive the antenna concurrently. Different from conventional single-feed antennas, multi-feed antennas can serve not only as radiating elements, but they can also function as signal processing units that interface among multiple electronic circuits,” Wang explained. “This opens a completely new design paradigm to have different electronic circuits driving the antenna collectively with different but optimized signal conditions, achieving unprecedented energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and reconfigurability.”

The cross-disciplinary co-design could also facilitate fabrication and operation of multiple transmitters and receivers on the same chip, allowing hundreds or even thousands of elements to work together as a whole system. “In massive MIMO systems, we need to have a lot of transmitters and receivers, so energy efficiency will become even more important,” Wang noted.

Having large numbers of elements working together becomes more practical at millimeter wave frequencies because the wavelength reduction means elements can be placed closer together to achieve compact systems, he pointed out. These factors could pave the way for new types of beamforming that are essential in future millimeter wave 5G systems.

Power demands could drive adoption of the technology for battery-powered devices, but Wang says the technology could also be useful for grid-powered systems such as base stations or wireless connections to replace cables in large data centers. In those applications, expanding data rates and reducing cooling needs could make the new devices attractive.

“Higher energy efficiency also means less energy will be converted to heat that must be removed to satisfy the thermal management,” he said. “In large data centers, even a small reduction in thermal load per device can add up. We hope to simplify the thermal requirements of these electronic devices.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Taiyun Chi, Huy Thong Nguyen and Tzu-Yuan Huang, all from Georgia Tech.

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Wang and Xu are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Wang is advised by Hua Wang, who leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS) and holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship in ECE. Xu is advised by Justin Romberg, who is the associate chair for research in ECE and holds the Schlumberger Professorship. They will also be advised by a mentor from Qualcomm on their project. 

The title of Wang’s and Xu’s award-winning project proposal is "An Artificial-Intelligence (AI) Assisted Mm-Wave Multi-Band Doherty Transmitter with Rapid Mixed-Mode In-Field Performance Optimization and Digital Pre-Distortion Compensation.” Wireless transmitters govern the energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, and the communication quality-of-service (QoS) in most wireless communication links. This is particularly true in future mm-wave 5G MIMO systems that rely on large numbers of high-performance transmitters working in close conjunction with antenna arrays and other electronics. 

Doherty transmitter architecture is gaining increasing attention due to its high energy efficiency, large modulation bandwidth, low baseband processing overhead, and wideband mm-Wave carrier coverage. However, Doherty transmitters require extensive performance tuning in practice, and despite their wide utility infrastructure/base-stations, their application in mobile platforms still remain elusive.

To address these issues, Wang and Xu have proposed an AI-assisted assisted “smart” mm-Wave Doherty TX architecture that achieves high-performance adaptive operation enabled by a built-in machine-learning core for dynamic, Doherty-specific performance optimization and digital pre-distortion (DPD) compensation. This project is one of the first research explorations on leveraging AI to radically enhance the performance and reliability of RF/mm-wave front-end electronics in in-field and on-the-fly operation environments.

The basis for awarding this grant is exceptional promise as a graduate student working in the fields of the NPSS and exceptionally good work in those fields. Ildefonso’s research focuses on studying the effects of ionizing radiation on electronic devices, circuits, and systems designed using silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies. 

The primary goal of Ildefonso’s work is to build more robust systems for space-based applications by identifying and implementing novel design strategies that improve the radiation tolerance of analog and RF circuits. Through internships at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., he has also worked on quantitatively correlating fundamental differences in charge deposition between heavy-ion- and laser-induced single-event transients (SETs) in SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors. This effort aims to provide an additional tool to qualify electronics for space applications.  

Ildefonso received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 2014 and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2017. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is advised by John D. Cressler, the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics. He was awarded the GEM Fellowship in 2014 and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2015.

Ildefonso’s research has been supported in part by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Science Foundation, and has resulted in 14 authored or co-authored peer-reviewed journal publications and four conference publications.

A December 2017 Ph.D. graduate of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Chi is now the RFIC design director at Speedlink Technology in Cupertino, California. While at Tech, he was a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, which is led by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang.

The title of the award-winning paper is “A Bidirectional Lens-Free Digital-Bits-In/-Out 0.57mm2 Terahertz Pico-Radio in CMOS with 49.3mW Peak Power Consumption Supporting 50cm Internet-of-Things Communication.” His coauthors on the paper are Wang, who also holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship, and Min-Yu Huang, an ECE Ph.D. student in the GEMS Lab, and Fa Foster Dai and Hechen Wang, both of the Department of ECE at Auburn University. 

Internet-of-Things (IoT) hold the promise for revolutionizing almost every industry sector in our society. These IoT devices will establish massively parallel and distributed wireless networks that connect almost any physical device, which realizes the ultimate integration of the physical world with computer-based cyber systems and enables automation in numerous areas, such as smart home, connected health, media/entertainment, manufacturing, and agriculture.

In this paper, Chi and his colleagues have demonstrated a bidirectional low-power radio platform for field-deployable wireless sensor network and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Compared with existing low-power radios that mostly operate at MHz-GHz frequencies, their proposed pico-radio utilizes THz carrier (320GHz) and nonlinear transmitter/receiver architecture, which leads to a radical reduction of antenna/electronics sizes and power consumption and results in sub-millimeter-scale form factor ("pico-size") and radio ultra-miniaturization. 

The THz radio also enables power-performance scalable operation, where the radio power consumption can be dynamically optimized to optimally support the actual link distance and required data rate, achieving an average micro-watt-level power consumption by duty cycle operations. The THz pico-sized radio is demonstrated using commercially available low-cost CMOS 45nm SOI process. This work is the first exploratory study and first working hardware demonstration of IoT devices using THz frequency. It realized an up-to 0.5m link distance between two CMOS THz pico-radios with a 4.4Mb/s data rate, achieving a world-record communication distance among reported THz radios and a very competitive link performance even among all of the reported MHz-GHz IoT radios. Together with energy harvesting/storage and in-situ feature-extraction computation, this CMOS THz pico-sized radio opens the door for massively field-deployable IoT devices and ultra-miniaturized wireless sensor nodes that are practically "invisible,” which will ultimately support future trillion-scaled IoT networks.

Manos Antonakakis, Dave Dagon (ECE); Michael Farrell (GTRI) – Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award

Farrokh Ayazi – Outstanding Achievement in Research Innovation Award

Morris Cohen – Center for Teaching and Learning/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

Joseph Hughes – Class of 1934 Outstanding Service Award

Aaron Lanterman – Class of 1940 W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award

Jacqueline Trappier – Outstanding Graduate Academic Advising Staff Award

Patricio Vela – Junior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award

Four ECE students were among the award winners recognized at the annual Georgia Tech Student Honors Celebration, held on April 18 at the Student Center Ballroom.

The following ECE-specific awards were recognized by College of Engineering Associate Dean Douglas Williams at this event. They and 31 additional students were presented with their awards at the Roger P. Webb Awards Program, held on April 10.

Jake Smith – Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award

Darshan Patel – Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award

Jake Smith – ECE Undergraduate Research Award

Connor Zachary Napolitano – Most Outstanding ECE Senior Co-op Award

The following ECE students were also recognized with awards given by other units and groups at Georgia Tech.

Jake Smith – Alvin M. Ferst Leadership and Entrepreneur Scholarship Award

This award is given to students with vision, a driving force to create a business or organization, the ability to inspire others to reach their potential, leadership skills to anticipate future needs, an optimistic outlook about finding solutions, and character – students who ask “Why not?” rather than “Why?”

Austin Keener, Jered Tupik – College of Engineering Honors Day Awards

These awards are given to engineering students who have the best academic records at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to making Georgia Tech and ECE better places to be!

Lee is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and is advised by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang, who holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship. Lee’s NDSEG Fellowship is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Lee’s proposed research involves investigating antenna-circuits co-design techniques to explore a fully integrated full-duplex THz hyperspectral imaging system in InP/CMOS heterogeneous technology. The goal for this technology is to revolutionize future imaging technologies for non-invasive and non-damaging evaluation and material characterization. He envisions his research to be a key enabler for high throughput quality and security screening, while paving the way for future electronics research such as full-duplex, high-speed massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output wireless communications.

Cheng and Nguyen are co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Alenka Zajic and Computer Science Professor Milos Prvulovic, who are their coauthors on this work.

Cheng’s poster, entitled "Exploiting Switching of Transistors in Digital Electronics for RFID Tag Design," presented a novel RFID tag and a backscattering channel created by switching transistors in digital electronic circuits have been introduced. The proposed RFID tag is highly reconfigurable, can operate at carrier frequencies from 1 to 26 GHz, and reach distances of a couple of meters. This new backscattering channel opens up opportunities for fully digital antenna-less RFID tags.

Cheng and Nguyen work in the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Lab (EMC^2), which is led by Zajic. For more information about their work, visit http://alenka.ece.gatech.edu.

Shruthi Kumara Vadivel was chosen for a Sigma Xi Best Master’s Thesis Award, and Taiyun Chi, Sourav Dutta, Matthew Hale, Shoufeng Lan, and Deepa Phanish were chosen for Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Awards.

Shruthi Kumara Vadivel’s thesis is entitled “Multi-Beam Interference: Three-Dimensional Bicontinuous Periodic Structures.” In her thesis, Vadivel developed ways to fabricate three-dimensional periodic lattice-based microstructures that can be used as micro-scaffolds to facilitate tissue and bone regrowth. The thesis research demonstrated using multi-beam interference to make scaffolds with the highly uniform and controlled porosity that are needed in these biomedical applications. Advised by ECE Regents’ Professor Thomas K. Gaylord, Vadivel graduated with her M.S. degree in May 2017 and is currently in Chennai, India.

Taiyun Chi’s thesis is entitled “Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Signal Generation and Detection in Silicon.” Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and Terahertz (THz) frequency ranges have stimulated increasing interest in multiple high-impact application spaces, including high-speed wireless communication, non-invasive imaging, radar, and molecular spectroscopy. However, one major technology roadblock of applying mm-wave/THz technologies lies in the lack of low-cost and compact implementations. In his dissertation, Chi presented his design philosophies and approaches towards the development of fully integrated signal generation and detection systems at mm-wave/THz frequencies using advanced silicon fabrication processes. He envisions that these endeavors will spur growth and advancement in the frontlines of mm-wave/THz research and enable field-deployable electronic systems for various emerging applications. Advised by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang, Chi graduated with his Ph.D. in December 2017 and is now the RFIC design director at Speedlink Technology, Inc. in Cupertino, California.

Sourav Dutta’s thesis is entitled “Beyond-CMOS Logic and Interconnect Using Collective Phenomena of Magnon, Skyrmion, and Plasmon.” The goal of Dutta’s research has been to investigate alternative paths for information processing (on chip computation as well as communication) utilizing electron spin and plasma oscillation and aims at efficient representation of devices and circuits built out of them to perform complex computation functions. Particularly, Dutta’s research focuses on collective phenomena, otherwise known as “quasiparticles,” that confers the advantages of energy efficient computing and maintaining the data even when the power has been turned off. The impact of the research goes beyond the idea of just enabling millions of densely packed devices computing at extremely low power. One can envision that now the results of computation may also be stored in the devices as they are being computed, and in a way may mimic how the human brain works! Advised by ECE Professor Azad J. Naeemi, Dutta has defended his thesis and will graduate with his Ph.D. in May 2018. Dutta will then begin work as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. 

Matthew Hale’s thesis is entitled “Mixed Centralized/Decentralized Coordination Protocols for Multi-Agent Systems.” This research enables new ways of coordinating multi-agent systems. A multi-agent system can be anything from a network of robots to a fleet of self-driving cars to a collection of smart buildings, and these applications can face a wide range of practical challenges as the agents work together. The work in the thesis incorporates cloud computing into multi-agent systems to provide new forms of data to agents, and it is shown that these data are useful in solving two fundamental multi-agent problems. First, asynchronous coordination is tackled, and it is shown that by introducing the cloud one allows the agents to successfully work together even when information sharing is intermittent and unreliable. Second, private coordination is considered, and it is shown how agents can collaborate but simultaneously guard sensitive data from each other with the help of the cloud. Co-advised by ECE Professors Magnus B. Egerstedt and Yorai Wardi, Hale graduated with his Ph.D. in May 2017 and is an assistant professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. 

Shoufeng Lan’s thesis is entitled “Plasmonic Metamaterials and an Optoelectronic Platform for Active and Nonlinear Nanophotonics.” Light, massless photons, oscillating at high frequencies, interact with matter to create the ultimate means of carrying information at unparalleled data speed. Most optical information relies on electrical signals that provide processing at end terminals, which causes a bottleneck of overall data that slows down the speed determined by the distance between electrical and optical devices. Currently, almost all electrical and optical devices are separated onto chips. However, the ideal goal is to have a single device that simultaneously sustains both electrical and optical functionalities. To achieve this goal, Lan’s thesis focuses on nonlinear optical phenomena to generate, modify, or detect optical signals by applying electrical biasing on the optoelectronic platform of plasmonic metamaterials. He and his colleagues electrically modulate nonlinear light-matter interactions, such as optical rectification and second-harmonic generation, enhanced by the resonance behavior in solid-state structures and electrolytic solutions, with externally applied voltage signals. Further, with electrically induced nonlinear optics, he and his colleagues rethink optical rules in artificial materials by demonstrating a long-standing prediction, backward phase-matching in negative-index materials, using a plasmonic waveguide scenario. The results reveal the potential of a plasmonic metamaterial as a self-contained electro-optic platform with intrinsically embedded electrical functions and exotic optical properties for signal processing, light switching, and sensing applications. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai, Lan graduated with his Ph.D. in May 2017 and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Deepa Phanish’s thesis is entitled “Optimal Clustering and Inter-cluster Routing in Large-scale Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks.” Sensor networks consisting of a large number of sensing devices connected together with transceivers can be used very effectively to monitor various environments. However, these devices are limited by their energy resources. In view of this, new fundamental analytical tools and distributed algorithms are developed to organize the network for energy-efficient gathering of sensed data and to construct delay-minimizing routes through them. The results are achieved by making broad contributions in the three primary areas of: analytical modeling; simulation of very large networks; and, design, implementation, and deployment of a sensor network testbed. This thesis enables the realization of the future large-scale Internet of Things and opens new avenues for the design of their network protocols. Advised by ECE Professor Edward J. Coyle, Phanish graduated with her Ph.D. in December 2017 and is a research engineer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

The IEEE NPSS is the premier professional association for the advancement of the nuclear and plasma sciences, sponsoring seven technical conferences and three peer-reviewed journals.



Ildefonso is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he is advised by John D. Cressler, the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics.

 Ildefonso’s research focuses on studying the effects of ionizing radiation on electronic devices, circuits, and systems designed using silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies. The primary goal of his work is to build more robust systems for space-based applications by identifying and implementing novel design strategies that improve the radiation tolerance of analog and RF circuits.



This research has been supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Science Foundation, and has resulted in 13 co-authored peer-reviewed journal publications and 4 co-authored conference publications.

​"Because it feels damn good." That's what Ken Byers will say, with a wide grin, when you ask why he's so passionate about giving back to Georgia Tech. In fact, it's starting to become something of a catch phrase for the engineering CEO and philanthropist. 

And he is just fine with that. 

"It's not about me. It's about Georgia Tech. It's about the real joy of giving," Byers says. That's why he's been doing it for so long.

Continue reading The Power of Giving, a story about the Byers Professors and Ken Byers (BSEE '66, MSEE '68).  

Wang leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) lab, which focuses on innovating integrated circuits and hybrid micro-systems to address future wireless communication, radar, imaging, and health care applications.

The three areas in which Wang will present lectures include:

• Broadband, Linear, and High-Efficiency Mm-Wave Power Amplifiers – The Unreasonable Quest for “Perfect” 5G Mm-Wave Power Amplifiers and Some Reasonable Solutions

• Merging Antenna Designs with Electronic Circuits – Multi-Feed Antennas Based Mm-Wave Front-Ends in Silicon for On-Antenna Power Combining, Active Load Modulation, and Full Duplex Operations

• Using Moore’s Law to Break Eroom’s Law? – Multimodal CMOS Cellular Interface for High Throughput Drug Screening and New Drug Development

A member of the ECE faculty since 2012, Wang holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship. Some of his most recent awards include the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018); IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award (2017); Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award (2016); and the NSF CAREER Award, Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and Georgia Tech ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award (all received in 2015).

Wang is an associate editor of the IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters and serves as a technical program committee and steering committee member for the top conferences in his field. He serves as the chair of Atlanta’s IEEE Circuits and Systems Society/Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) joint chapter, which won the IEEE SSCS Outstanding Chapter Award in 2014.

This is a highly prestigious and competitive honor for Ph.D. students in IEEE AP-S, and the goal of this award is to encourage pursuit of careers in advanced electromagnetics. Li's proposed research focuses on innovative multi-feed antennas and their co-operations with electronics to achieve mm-Wave massive MIMO systems with unprecedented front-end performance. The award announcement will be featured in the Education Column of the upcoming IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

Li has worked for three years in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, where he is advised by Hua Wang. Li received his B.Eng. with highest honors and B.A. from Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China and was awarded a First-Class Scholarship for outstanding undergraduate students. He also received Analog Devices, Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2018.

Li’s paper has been selected as a Best Student Paper Award Finalist at the 2018 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC), to be held June 10-12 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. research focuses on mm-Wave and THz integrated antenna, circuit, and system designs for 5G MIMO wireless communication, radar, and hyperspectral imaging applications.

A member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty since 2012, Wang holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship and leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab. He has also received multiple prestigious academic awards, including the IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2017, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2016, National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2015, Roger P. Webb ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2015, and Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, as well as many best paper awards in the field of solid-state circuits, systems, and microwave engineering. Wang is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society for 2018 and 2019.

As millimeter-wave frequency applications have become prevalent in the commercial and Department of Defense markets, there is a rapidly growing need for advanced millimeter-wave solid-state power amplifier technologies that can support high energy efficiency, sufficient output power, and high-speed complex modulations. Moreover, high-efficiency amplifiers covering extremely wide bandwidth have become a necessity, particularly for frequency-agile massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems, such as multi-standard 5G wireless communication.

In this project, Wang will lead the fundamental research on a completely new class of extremely-wideband-yet-efficient power amplifiers over the frequency range of 30-100GHz. The key technology innovations include novel amplifier circuit topologies, hybrid use of silicon/non-silicon solid-state devices, and multi-mode amplifier operations.

This project will potentially achieve a new class of load modulation power amplifiers with an unprecedented combination of bandwidth, energy efficiency, and output power. Such amplifier technologies will eventually enable true “common-module front-ends” for reconfigurable transmitters and MIMO systems with "full-spectrum access" and digital beam-forming for wireless communication, radar, imaging, and spectrum sensing applications.

Tenure

Wenshan Cai

Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure

Morris B. Cohen

Omer T. Inan

Hua Wang

Promotion to Professor

Moinnudin K. Qureshi - promotion to professor

Christopher J. Rozell - promotion to professor

Shyh-Chiang Shen - promotion to professor

The title of their award-winning paper is “Inkjet and 3D Printing Technology for Fundamental Millimeter-Wave Wireless Packaging,” which they co-authored with Manos Tentzeris, their Ph.D. advisor and ECE’s Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics. 

This work outlines the combination of additive inkjet and 3D printing fabrication technology for the realization of millimeter-wave wireless packages and multi-chip modules. Fully-printed ramp interconnects and “smart” encapsulants are demonstrated as an efficient alternative to traditional microelectronic wire bonding and epoxy molding techniques, respectively. These highly-reconfigurable packaging techniques have the potential to enable the scale development of application-specific wireless millimeter-wave systems for emerging 5G, IoT, and automotive radar applications.

This Class of 1940 distinction is one of several awards made annually by CTL to instructors of small and large classes. The award recognizes faculty members with exceptional response rates and scores on the Course-Instructor Opinion Surveys (CIOS). A high response rate (85 percent or greater) and a near-perfect evaluation score were also required for consideration.

Cressler is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in IAC 3803 Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue. He holds the Schlumberger Chair Professorship in Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

Egerstedt is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 6553 Optimal Control and Optimization. He holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair Professorship in the School of ECE.

Yang is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 2026 Introduction to Signal Processing. A frequent instructor of ECE courses, Yang is a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory.

Advised by Hua Wang, director of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and ECE’s Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor, Chi is conducting research for his Ph.D. thesis topic, "Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Signal Generation and Detection in Silicon.” This is the third year in a row that one of Wang’s Ph.D. students has been chosen for this award.

The IEEE SSCS Pre-doctoral Achievement Award recognizes Chi's three major research achievements in the field of RF/mm-Wave wireless circuits and systems through his Ph.D work.

Chi has demonstrated the world’s first mm-Wave full-duplex chip-to-chip communication link with 4Gbit/s data rate using the 45nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The technology can be directly applied in future full-duplex massive MIMO systems for high-throughput 5G applications such as vehicle-vehicle/vehicle-infrastructure communication, drone-based communication, and AR/VR. This work will be presented at the 2018 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), to be held in San Francisco from February 11-15.

He showed a novel antenna-electronics co-design methodology whose first implementation demonstrated a multi-feed antenna driven concurrently by multiple coherent signal sources, such as mm-Wave transmitters or power amplifiers, for on-antenna low loss power combining at mm-wave. This work achieved 4-times output power and 2-times efficiency improvement over state-of-the-art silicon-based transmitters at 60GHz, and this may serve as an enabling technology for future low-cost mm-Wave MIMO base stations and wireless infrastructures. This work was presented at the 2017 IEEE ISSCC, also held in San Francisco.   

Chi also led a project on "invisible sensor nodes," which utilizes THz (320GHz) carrier signals and nonlinear transmitter/receiver architectures to achieve a nano-scaled (mm^3) sensor platform. This platform supports a wide variety of miniaturized sensors and provides reliable meter-scaled wireless communication with 4.4Mbit/s data rate and micro-watt average power consumption. This was the world's first demonstration of leveraging THz carrier signals to realize ultra-miniaturization of low-power radio platforms. This technology opens the door to future massively field-deployable "invisible sensor nodes" and sensor networks for various defense and consumer applications, including Internet-of-Things. This work was presented at the 2017 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), held in Austin, Texas, and won the 2017 IEEE CICC Best Paper Award as the top paper among all the papers presented at the conference.

Established in 2000, the mission of the KEF is to provide scholarships for excellent Korean students studying abroad and enable them to concentrate on their studies and develop their full potential. Each year, the KEF selects distinguished Korean students who will pursue their advanced studies in widely recognized universities outside of Korea and offers up to five years of financial support for students pursuing doctoral degrees. The scholarship recipients are selected based on their outstanding undergraduate academic performance, the excellence of their graduate programs, and the potential impact of their graduate research.

Joun began pursuing his Ph.D. studies this fall in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-Systems (GEMS) Lab, which is directed by ECE Assistant Professor and Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor Hua Wang. His Ph.D. research focuses on multi-modal hybrid biology/nano-electronics systems for sensing, actuation, and energy harvesting.

Joun received his B.Sc. in ECE at Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea (Summa Cum Laude) in summer 2017. He received a two-year National Scholarship for Science and Engineering from the Korea Student Aid Foundation in 2014-2015. He won the Silver Medal of the University Students Contest of Mathematics in the Korean Mathematical Society in 2008. 

To learn more about the Kwanjeong Education Foundation, please visit http://en.ikef.or.kr.

Wang is being honored "for outstanding early career contributions to the microwave profession" and will receive this award at the 2017 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium, which will be held June 4-9 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He will be the fourth faculty member from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) to receive this prestigious honor. Previous ECE awardees include John Papapolymerou (2009), Manos Tentzeris (2006), and Joy Laskar (2003).

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in ECE and leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab. He is interested in innovating and engineering mixed-signal, RF, and millimeter-wave/THz integrated systems for wireless communication and bioelectronics applications, such as 5G mm-Wave MIMO communication and Augmented-Reality/Virtual-Reality (AR/VR) data transfer, mm-Wave/THz hyperspectral imaging for food safety and security scanning, THz nano-radio Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, and massively paralleled cell screening platforms for new drug development.

Since 2012, his graduate students have received 34 fellowships and awards from several different IEEE societies or best paper or designer awards from IEEE conferences, government agencies, and industry. Wang received the NSF CAREER Award, the Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, and the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, and he was elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2015. He is also the chair of the Atlanta section of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits and Circuits and Systems Societies. Wang’s group has published 89 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. His research has been supported by government agencies including NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, AFRL, NIST, and DARPA, as well as multiple industry sponsors.

"I am humbled to receive this prestigious MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and I am deeply indebted to so many great people who have supported me," Wang said. "With the surging interest in 5G communication, IoT, and security, there are many emerging applications and new challenges in the field of microwave engineering. Our School of ECE has a long and rich history in this space, and it provides a perfect research environment for us to address these unmet technology needs."

Photo cutline: Hua Wang (right) is presented with the 2017 IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award by Dylan Williams, the president of IEEE MTT-S. 

Drs. Zajić and Stüber share this award with their colleagues Thomas Pratt, a research professor at the University of Notre Dame, and Son Nguyen, a researcher with the Army Research Laboratory. They will receive this honor at an awards luncheon during the 76th IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Conference, to be held September 3-6 in Quebec City, Canada.

Mobile-to-mobile communication systems have recently drawn great attention because they have the potential to improve convenience and safety of automobile transportation. For example, sensor-equipped cars that communicate via wireless links (and thus create ad-hoc networks) can be used to reduce traffic accidents and facilitate traffic flow. Mobile-to-mobile communication systems also find applications in intelligent transportation systems, relay-based cellular networks, and future combat systems. The design of highly reliable mobile-to-mobile wireless communication systems requires a detailed understanding of propagation among vehicles. The awarded paper presents the first three-dimensional wideband channel model for mobile-to-mobile communications and presents experimental validation of this model.

This paper is a result of Dr. Zajić's Ph.D. thesis work while she was a member of Wireless Systems Laboratory, which is led by Dr. Stüber, and the research was funded by the Army Research Laboratory Collaborative Technology Alliance for Communications and Networking. Dr. Zajić is a new assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, while Dr. Stüber has been on the ECE faculty since 1986, where he is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair Professor in Communications. 
 

Made possible by an endowment from The Goizueta Foundation, this fellowship is awarded to Hispanic/Latino students within Georgia Tech doctoral programs who bring exemplary levels of scholarship, leadership, and innovation to the academic departments that host their study and research. 

Ildefonso’s research efforts are focused on analyzing and modeling the transient effects of ionizing radiation on RF communications systems. Heavy ions and other energetic particles present in these environments can go through these systems and corrupt the data that is being transmitted or received. The goal of Ildefonso's work is to explore and leverage circuit design techniques to mitigate the effects of radiation on these systems and enable more robust communications systems for space environments. 

Ildefonso is pursuing his Ph.D. studies in the Silicon-Germanium Research Group, which is led by John Cressler, the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics. Originally from Puerto Rico, Ildefonso completed his B.Sc. degree in computer engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez in 2014.

Alam and Sehatbakhsh are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science (CS), and Callan is a postdoctoral fellow in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). They are co-advised by Alenka Zajic, an assistant professor in ECE, and Milos Prvulovic, a professor in CS.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced new security risks for both consumers and businesses. Mitigation of these risks is difficult in part because IoT devices often have limited resources that can be leveraged to monitor their security, and often have limited hardware and system support for isolation and protection. Unfortunately, existing malware detection techniques require significant computation power and resources on the monitored device itself, making their deployment on IoT devices challenging.

To mitigate this problem, this CS/ECE research team has developed a new method to detect malware by externally observing Electromagnetic (EM) signals emitted by an IoT system and showed a demo of how it works at the IEEE HOST Symposium. The system collects EM signals from a distance of a few meters, records them, and uses a spectral monitoring algorithm that the team developed to detect any malware intrusion on an IoT system.

In order to enable future multi-band 5G MIMO systems with high reliability and international roaming, Wang’s group has demonstrated the world’s first mm-Wave Doherty power amplifier that can cover multiple 5G bands (28GHz, 37GHz, and 39GHz) in only one silicon IC chip with the best reported back-off power efficiency enhancement among silicon power amplifiers. This single IC-footprint Doherty power amplifier is ideally suited for use in ultra-high-speed wireless data transfer and augmented-reality and virtual-reality (AR/VR) devices.

The team’s second demonstrator is a mm-wave multi-feed antenna and transmitter co-design for 5G backhaul applications. Unlike traditional phased-array designs, which comprise hundreds or thousands of many small antennas to achieve high gain at the expense of array beam-width, Wang’s group proposed and demonstrated a new multi-feed antenna concept that enables direct on-antenna power combining of multiple mm-wave power amplifiers; a proof-of-concept design in standard CMOS process achieves the best output power and energy efficiency among reported mm-Wave power amplifiers or transmitters whilst maintaining a single antenna footprint. This new multi-feed antenna and transmitter co-design is particularly useful to support high-performance long-range back-haul base-station/base-station communication for 5G networks and vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure 5G links for self-driving transportation ‘smart city’ developments.

The team’s third demonstrator, a wideband digital power amplifier with built-in phase distortion cancellation, addresses the unmet need of broadband, high-efficiency, and high-linearity power amplifiers for 5G RF (<6GHz) applications. Digital power amplifiers offer superior energy efficiency and reconfigurability but often exhibit poor phase linearity under large signal operations. Wang’s group presented a novel digital power amplifier topology using feed forward capacitors and phase-insensitive matching network, which autonomously compensates and improves the phase linearity with no need of phase pre-distortion.

The final presentation by Wang’s team, an ultra-broadband 100GHz-300GHz transmitter/receiver system for mm-Wave/THz hyperspectral imaging, seeks to make terahertz based spectroscopy quick, non-destructive, and portable. This newly developed sensor platform may be used for a broad array of applications, such as wireless patient point-of-care health examinations via breath analysis and non-destructive and on-location scanning of packaged food items for safety and quality control. Additionally, the new sensor’s bandwidth, transmitter power flatness, and receiver sensitivity make it ideal for use in the growing world of new materials research and 3D printing by spectrally evaluating for hidden defects. The team demonstrated the successful real-time detection of metal screws in the sealed, packaged cookies and water content measurements in fresh vs. dry leaves.

About Dr. Wang

Professor Wang received his B.Sc. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2003, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 2007 and 2009, respectively.  Dr. Wang is generally interested in innovating and engineering mixed-signal, RF, and mm-Wave integrated systems for wireless communication and bioelectronics applications. He is a member of Sigma Xi, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, and the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

About IEEE ISSCC

The IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the flagship conference for solid state circuit design.

Further Reading

A 28GHz/37GHz/39GHz Multiband Linear Doherty Power Amplifier for 5G Massive MIMO Applications. Authors: Song Hu, Fei Wang, Hua Wang

A 60GHz On-Chip Linear Radiator with Single-Element 27.9dBm Psat and 33.1dBm Peak EIRP Using Multi-Feed Antenna for Direct On-Antenna Power Combining.
Authors: Taiyun Chi, Fei Wang, Sensen Li, Min-Yu Huang, Jongseok Park, and Hua Wang

A Packaged 90-300GHz Transmitter and 115-325GHz Coherent Receiver in CMOS for Full-Band Continuous-Wave Mm-Wave and THz Hyperspectral Imaging.
Authors: Taiyun Chi, Min-Yu Huang, Sensen Li, and Hua Wang

- Christa M. Ernst

Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure

Mark A. Davenport

Maryam Saeedifard

Alenka Zajic

Promotion to Full Professor

Maysam Ghovanloo

Santiago C. Grijalva

Azad J. Naeemi

Fumin Zhang

New applications such as self-driving cars, smart homes, and/or industrial automation will all require cloud computing that relies on many fast computers in data centers. However, even today, cable management in data centers is a serious challenge and limitation of the number of pins on the processor is becoming a bottleneck in designing faster computers.

To alleviate these problems, Zajic is exploring ways to design wireless links at terahertz frequencies that can provide data rates of hundreds of gigabytes per second that would alleviate “cable management” and “pin-count” problems. Insights and results from this project will develop fundamental understanding of wireless propagation at terahertz frequencies and also stimulate further related research in wireless communications and computer engineering. 

A member of the ECE faculty since 2012, Zajic leads the Electromagnetic Measurements in Communications and Computing Laboratory, where she advises 11 Ph.D. students. Zajic has won several best paper awards and she is currently an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

Tentzeris and his colleagues, Apostolos Georgiadis and George Goussetis, both faculty members at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, were recognized for their project, “3D/Inkjet Printed Millimeter Wave Systems.” This is the first additive manufacturing approach combining 3D and inkjet printing up to 100 GHz that could be used in applications such as communications, sensing, energy transfer and harvesting, Internet of Things, autonomous cars, and smart skins. This technique would enable wireless operability in frequencies and data rates 10-40 times higher than that of previous state-of-the-art printed devices, while reducing the fabrication cost by 5-10 times.

Tentzeris is the Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he has been a faculty member since 1998. He also leads the ATHENA Lab, which is based in the School of ECE. 

This year’s winners were selected from among seven finalists who were drawn from a total field of over 250 proposals from 41 countries. All of the prize winners demonstrated game-changing ideas in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics with the potential to improve the future of the human experience by ten-fold. In addition to their cash prizes, the winners will also be able to collaborate with Nokia Bell Labs researchers on the further development of their ideas.