Saeedifard joined the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in January 2014, where she is an assistant professor in the electrical energy technical interest group. Her research interests are in the areas of power electronics, high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, high-power energy conversion, grid integration of renewable energy resources, and hybrid electric vehicles and transportation systems.

Before joining Tech, Saeedifard was on the ECE faculty at Purdue University for four years. She is an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

The GRA Academy of Eminent Scholars numbers 63, and in 2014, was responsible for generating more than $300 million in competitively-funded research activity. GRA Eminent Scholars employ some 1,200 faculty, graduate students, and technicians in their labs, and last year filed 47 invention disclosures and were granted 23 patent applications. 

Kane and Emelianov come to Georgia Tech from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively, while Divan returns to Tech after taking a four-year leave to establish an electrical energy startup company in the Bay Area.

“We are proud to welcome Deepak Divan, Stanislav Emelianov, and Ravi Kane to our Academy and to Georgia Tech,” said C. Michael Cassidy, President and CEO, Georgia Research Alliance. “They bring to Georgia vast knowledge and expertise that will help to further development in the fields of cancer nanotechnology, energy management, and medical imaging.”

Ravi Kane Joins ChBE as Betty Chair/Eminent Scholar

Ravi Kane has joined the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as a professor and holder of the Garry Betty/V Foundation Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Cancer Nanotechnology. Kane will hold also program faculty status in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Previously, Kane served on the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and held the P.K. Lashmet Professorship.

“Ravi is a wonderfully creative and effective researcher, and we are thrilled to have him join us at Georgia Tech,” said Professor and ChBE School Chair David Sholl.

Holding master’s and doctoral degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kane focuses his research on the interface of biotechnology and nanotechnology.

His research group is designing nanoscale polyvalent therapeutics and working on the molecular engineering of biosurfaces and nanostructures. The Kane group is also interested in using protein engineering, nanotechnology, and other tools to combat cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, influenza, and antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Having contributed to more than 125 scientific publications, Kane has received numerous honors throughout his career. In 2004, MIT Technology Review named him one of the top 100 young innovators in the world.

Since then, he has received an American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award, Global Indus Technovator Award, American Chemical Society’s Biochemical Technology Division Young Investigator Award, Society for Biological Engineers’ Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication, as well as other recognitions for research and teaching excellence.

Elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows in 2013, Kane is a member of the editorial board for the Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Kane’s Chair was endowed by the family of Charles Garrett “Garry” Betty (BS ChBE 1979). Betty was president and CEO of the Internet service provider EarthLink from 1996 until his death from a rare type of cancer in 2007. He was inducted into the Georgia Technology Hall of Fame in 2005.

Betty’s wife, Kathy, received the 2013 College of Engineering’s Dean’s Appreciation Award for her continual support of Tech.

Divan Named as Eminent Scholar/Pippin Professor

Deepak Divan has been appointed as the John E. Pippin Chair Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and as a GRA Eminent Scholar. In this new role, Divan will also serve as director of the Georgia Tech Center for Distributed Energy, which will focus on enabling the transition of the global electrical energy infrastructure from a fossil-fuel powered, top-down controlled system to a massively-distributed, resilient, smart, and sustainable system.

“We are excited to welcome Deepak back to Georgia Tech,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “He is internationally recognized and respected in the electrical energy arena, and he will be an effective leader in developing the energy delivery systems of the future.”

An ECE faculty member since 2004, Divan works in the areas of dynamic grid control, advanced and integrated power electronics, and sustainable energy systems. He is known for his seminal work in technologies that protect equipment against power disturbances that impact industries such as utilities, semiconductors, automotive, and food processing. He served as director for the Intelligent Power Infrastructure Consortium, a university-industry-utility consortium to foster and accelerate the development and adoption of early-stage, pre-competitive high-risk and high-impact technologies in power applications.

For the last several years, Divan has been on leave in order to establish and lead his third startup company, Varentec, which is funded by leading VCs Khosla Ventures and investor Bill Gates. Varentec, based in Santa Clara, California, builds distributed power management and monitoring solutions for the electric grid. Divan currently serves as the scientific founder and Chief Scientist for the company. He is also the scientific founder of two additional companies–Innovolt, based in Atlanta, which makes next-generation power protection and asset management devices and where he serves on the Board, and Soft Switching Technologies Corporation, where he served as CEO and developed a range of devices to help manufacturing facilities ride through power disturbances. At Soft Switching, Divan also conceptualized and helped to develop the I-Grid, the first publicly accessible Internet-based power monitoring network in the U.S., which allows industries and utilities to diagnose widespread power quality events and unsolved downtime events. Soft Switching was acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2012. Finally, his work at Georgia Tech has provided the foundation for another start-up company – Smart Wires, which is located in Oakland, California, and provides power flow control devices for the transmission grid.

Divan holds more than 60 issued or pending patents, with over half in use by industry, and he has published over 300 refereed journal and conference papers, including 12 outstanding prize paper awards.

In 2015, Divan was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He served as president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) in 2009-2010, and he was named as the first recipient of the IEEE Newell Field Medal, the highest honor given by IEEE in the area of power electronics “for leadership in the development of soft-switching power converters.” Divan also served as an IEEE Industry Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2004 and 2005, and he was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1998.

Emelianov Named as Eminent Scholar/Pettit Chair in Microelectronics

Stanislav (Stas) Emelianov has been appointed as the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Microelectronics and as a GRA Eminent Scholar. He is based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“Stas is a thoughtful and innovative researcher who has made a significant impact in his field, and we are delighted to have him join the ECE and BME faculties at Georgia Tech,” said McLaughlin and Ravi Bellamkonda, the Wallace H. Coulter Chair Professor in BME. “Stas will be a fantastic bridge between ECE and BME, and will also work closely with Winship Cancer Institute to pursue his cancer related research.”

Prior to joining Tech, Emelianov was on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, he served as the Cockrell Professor of Biomedical Engineering and as an adjunct professor of imaging physics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. His research interests are in the development of advanced imaging methods capable of detecting and diagnosing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other pathologies.

Emelianov also focuses on assisting treatment planning, enhancing image-guided therapy, and monitoring of treatment outcomes. He has led a team that discovered a minimally invasive way to detect plaques that are most likely to cause heart attacks. He has also conducted groundbreaking work on deep vein thrombosis, predicting rupture of plaques for cardiovascular applications, and imaging sentinel lymph nodes and micrometastases for cancer.

Emelianov and his collaborators have published over 470 refereed journal and conference papers and 13 edited books and book chapters, and he has 15 patents that have either been issued or are pending. In serving his professional community, Emelianov is the editor of Photoacoustics and is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

Emelianov has held leadership roles in ultrasonics conferences and symposia sponsored by both IEEE and SPIE. In addition, he is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was also elected to the College of Fellows for the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011.

While at UT-Austin, Emelianov served as the BME associate chair for research and chair of the undergraduate curriculum committee, and he received several teaching awards at both the department and university levels. He has graduated 20 Ph.D. students and four M.S. students, many of whom have received fellowships, national research service awards, and honors and awards from both IEEE and SPIE. He has also advised 45 undergraduate researchers.

Story Contributors: Brad Dixon, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 404-385-2299; Jackie Nemeth, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 404-894-2906; Walter Rich, Biomedical Engineering, 404-385-2416.

The paper, published in the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid in 2014, was coauthored with Daniel E. Olivares, Claudio A. Cañizares, Mehrdad Kazerani, and Amir H. Hajimiragha (University of Waterloo); Ali Mehrizi-Sani (Washington State University); Amir H. Etemadi and Reza Iravani (University of Toronto); Oriol Gomis-Bellmunt, Rodrigo Palma-Behnke, and Guillermo A. Jiménez-Estévez  (University of Chile); and Nikos D. Hatziargyriou (National Technical University of Athens).

The microgrid concept is a quite appealing alternative for overcoming the challenges of integrating distributed energy resource (DER) units, including renewable energy sources, into power systems. However, in order to allow seamless deployment of microgrids, several issues still remain unsolved.

Currently, effort is being put into the design of special protection schemes and control systems that ensure reliable, secure, and economical operation of microgrids in either grid-connected or stand-alone mode. Saeedifard and her colleagues classify the micro grid control strategies into three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary, where the primary and secondary levels are associated with the operation of the microgrid itself, and the tertiary level pertains to the coordinated operation of the microgrid and the host grid. The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the existing technologies and remaining challenges in microgrid control.

Daruna’s high school job revealed an aptitude for electronics, computers, and programming that led him to study engineering in college. After revealing to a customer that his program wasn’t challenging him, the customer suggested transferring to the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech, his engineering education expanded and his opportunities blossomed.

"Georgia Tech was the perfect institution for my junior and senior year of college because it helped me sharpen my engineering mind and broaden my perspective to a larger world with new opportunities," said Daruna.

Daruna embraced the challenge of studying at a top-tier institution. Due to family members who immigrated to the United States and the struggles they endured, he already had an innate sense of the hard work and sacrifice his education would require. When his family left Cuba in 1970, they lost everything and had to start a long process of rebuilding in the United States.

“I always knew how hard my grandfather, father, and mother worked since they came here, so I want to continue the progress and support them in their old age,” said Daruna.

With his bachelor’s degree under his belt, Daruna now plans to pursue graduate school with a focus on robotics and later teaching. While he waits for that to begin, he will spend quality time with his main source of inspiration—his family.

Photos: Angel Daruna giving his speech. | Angel Daruna and his family at the graduation ceremony.

Lan is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai. Lan’s research on electronically controlled nonlinear metamaterials has led to a number of articles in high profile publications such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Nano Letters. To learn more about Shoufeng's work, please read this June 2015 news release about his and his colleagues’ work in the Cai Lab.

MRS graduate student awards are intended to honor and encourage graduate students whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high level of excellence and distinction. Through this award program, MRS seeks to recognize students of exceptional ability who show promise for significant future achievement in materials research.

This award is the highest honor for Ph.D. students from the IEEE SSCS, and Hu is the first Georgia Tech student to receive this honor since this awards program was established in 1983.

Hu is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS), which is led by Hua Wang, the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in ECE. Thus far, Hu has authored or co-authored 22 peer reviewed conference and journal publications and one book chapter, all in the area of integrated circuits and systems.

The IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is based on Hu’s research on “Mixed-Signal Power Amplifier Architecture with Self-Contained In-Situ Linearization and Efficiency Enhancement.” This work focuses on innovating advanced RF transmitter architectures for high-speed wireless data transmission and power-adaptive, energy-efficient wireless power transfer. Powerful digital computation capabilities in nanoscale CMOS processes are leveraged for in-situ linearity and back-off efficiency enhancement.

Compared with conventional RF transmitters, these digital intensive architectures are particularly useful for full system-on-chip integration of next-generation, energy-efficient mobile devices or field-deployable wireless networks that can be used for both military and commercial applications, such as reconfigurable radars with digital beam-forming and wireless handsets for ultra-high speed, fifth-generation communication.

The MC6 Competition is aimed at rewarding promising innovations through six-minute, business-oriented presentations given by 13 candidates/teams that represent several schools and universities in the Lorraine Region. Six candidates/teams, including Bishop, were selected for the final.

Bishop’s project focuses on developing new micro-sensor technologies based on nitride semiconductor materials. The main goal is to develop a new generation of improved exhaust gas sensors for diesel antipollution systems that are able to meet upcoming European Union emissions regulations. The project includes work performed on each step involved in device development, including modeling and design, device fabrication, sensor testing, and prototype building. The sensor technology developed in this project has also been extended for other applications, such as detection of other gases, water pollution, and medical diagnostics. This work is conducted under the framework of the Open Lab PSA Peugeot Citroen.

Bishop completed his master’s and Ph.D. at GTL, where he was advised by ECE Professor and GTL Director Abdallah Ougazzaden and co-advised by ECE Associate Professor Paul Voss. Bishop is currently pursuing the commercialization of the sensor technologies that he has developed through Institut Lafayette.  

Pictured in the photo, left to right: Chris Bishop, GTL-ECE postdoctoral fellow, receives his award from Gilbert Krausener, vice president of Metz Metropole Higher Education, Research and Innovation, and Pierre-Olivier Defoug, general director ILP (Institut Lorrain de Participation, a funding agency in the Region of Lorraine). 

Yalamanchili has been a prolific contributor to the fields of high performance multiprocessor communication, multicore computing, and heterogeneous computing throughout his long and distinguished career in academia. Prior to joining ECE as an associate professor in 1989, he worked at Honeywell’s Systems and Research Center and was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Minnesota. He has been a full professor at Tech since 1998 and has held the title of Joseph M. Pettit Professor since 2004.

A Fellow of the IEEE, Yalamanchili has provided technical leadership through his service on various editorial boards and program committees in computer architecture and high performance computing. He has served on several advisory committees in industry and government, including the HyperTransport Consortium – an industry consortium of 50-plus companies that produced the HyperTransport interconnect ecosystem developed by AMD. Based on efforts in his lab, Yalamanchili and his Ph.D. advisee proposed a new interconnect-memory standard that became the HyperTransport-Over-Ethernet standard adopted by the Consortium in 2010. More recently, his service includes participation in working groups and planning meetings for high performance computing efforts within the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. During his career at Tech, Yalamanchili has been PI or co-PI for sponsored projects that have attracted approximately $30 million in sponsored funding. His group explores novel concepts in computer architecture, with current emphases on heterogeneous computing, power and thermal issues, and interconnection networks and memory hierarchies. Together with Doug Blough of ECE and Calton Pu of the College of Computing, Yalamanchili co-directs the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center on Experimental Research in Computer Systems.

Yalamanchili has been a key contributor to Tech’s computer engineering (CmpE) educational program with a record of sustained excellence in curricular and student mentoring efforts. A highly rated instructor for both undergraduate and graduate courses, he has provided leadership in several revisions of the CmpE curriculum, including its most recent in 2012, and has authored two undergraduate texts. Yalamanchili has been involved in a diverse set of leadership activities within ECE and Georgia Tech. These include several terms as chair of the CmpE technical interest group (TIG), chair of the Computer Engineering Program Study Group (2009) tasked with developing a strategic vision for the growth of the CmpE program, multiple terms on the ECE Statutory Advisory Committee most recently as its Chair (2013-2015), and the Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) process within the School, within the College of Computing where he holds an adjunct appointment, and at the Institute level. Junior-level faculty members have twice nominated him for the D. Scott Wills ECE Distinguished Mentor Award, resulting in Yalamanchili receiving this honor in 2007 and 2014.

“Sudha is exceptionally deserving of being named a Regents' Professor, and I am thrilled that he has been chosen by the University System Board of Regents and the Georgia Tech administration to hold this title,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “He is an outstanding scholar and teacher, an inspirational mentor to students and faculty, a dedicated volunteer to his professional society and to the engineering field, and a model citizen on campus. He has our heartfelt thanks for all that he has done for ECE and Georgia Tech, and we are very fortunate to have him as our colleague and friend.”

The Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program promotes the careers of faculty members who show great promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies, and it also fosters long-term collaborative relationships with senior Intel technical leaders.

Raychowdhury leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab at Tech. His research interests include digital and mixed-signal circuit design, design of on-chip sensors, memory, and device-circuit interactions. He holds more than 25 U.S. and international patents and has published over 100 articles in refereed journals and conferences.

Prior to joining Tech, Raychowdhury was a research scientist at Intel for five years. He graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2007 and his B.E. in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, located in Kolkata, India.

Raychowdhury recently became ECE’s first recipient of the National Science Foundation CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, which supports research for new faculty members within the first two years of their tenure position. Prior to his arrival at Tech, he won the Intel Labs Technical Contribution Award in 2011, several best paper honors, and top awards for his doctoral research while at Purdue University. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Zhang was honored for his poster paper entitled “Reduction of PDN Induced Coupling into Signal Lines Using PTL Power Distribution,” which was co-authored by ECE Professors Madhavan Swaminathan (who is also Zhang’s advisor) and David Keezer.

A conventional power delivery network (PDN) uses power planes to carry current from the power supply to various loads. However, in this paper, the authors have demonstrated through measurement that such PDN is highly susceptible to electromagnetic coupling from signal lines that are routed either as microstrip lines or lines that go through the printed circuit board (PCB) through via transitions. This PDN will then, in turn, couple unwanted energy to other parts of the system, leading to signal and power integrity degradation.

Recently, a new PDN topology was proposed to utilize transmission lines to deliver power to the loads, hence the name power transmission line (PTL). This innovative idea comes from the Georgia Tech Mixed Signal Design Group, led by Swaminathan, and is currently investigated by Zhang. Due to the geometry and routing flexibility of PTLs, the investigators have shown through measurement that the PTL-based PDN can provide wide-band (200MHz-5GHz) and better isolation than the conventional PDN designs in both the microstrip line and via-transition cases.

As an example, in the via-transition case, which is a very common practice in PCB designs, the PTL provides -40dB or better isolation while the conventional designs have a worst-case isolation that reaches -10dB. The PTL-based PDN can be used in applications such as modern high speed I/O systems and RF and mixed-signal designs that require high signal fidelity, low noise, and good signal to PDN isolation.

This team, from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), won the award for their demo entitled “Live Demonstration: A Smart Homecage System with Behavior Analysis and Closed-Loop Optogenetic Stimulation Capabilities.” Jia (a Ph.D. student), Wang (a visiting student), and Mirbozorgi (ECE postdoctoral fellow) are members of the GT-Bionics Lab, led by ECE Associate Professor Maysam Ghovanloo.

In this live demonstration, the team presented a smart, wirelessly-powered homecage, called the Enercage-HC system, for conducting behavioral and electrophysiology research on awake, freely-behaving small animal subjects. The smart homecage is equipped with closed-loop wireless power transmission, wireless communication, automated tracking, and animal behavior recognition capabilities.

Wireless power is delivered in near-field at 13.56 MHz in the FCC-approved ISM-band through an array of coils designed to provide the entire homecage with homogeneous magnetic field. Bidirectional data transmission is accomplished at 2.4 GHz via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for communication with sensors and stimulators attached to or implanted in the animal body. A dual-mode 2D/3D imaging system based on Microsoft Kinect is used for animal subject tracking and behavioral analysis using an advanced real-time pattern recognition and machine learning algorithm.

Photo caption: Yaoyao Jia shows the Enercage-HC System at IEEE BioCAS 2015, held October 22-24 in Atlanta.

Photo caption: Abdollah Mirbozorgi (far left) and Yaoyao Jia were presented with the Best Live Demo Award at IEEE BioCAS 2015, held October 22-24 in Atlanta. Taking part in the presentation were ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang (far right), who served as co-chair of the conference live demo session, and ECE Associate Professor Maysam Ghovanloo (second from left).

Lee was honored for his paper entitled "A Multi-Cycle Q-Modulation Technique for Wirelessly-Powered Biomedical Implants,” which was coauthored with fellow ECE Ph.D. student Pyungwoo Yeon and ECE Associate Professor Maysam Ghovanloo, who advises both students and serves as director of the GT-Bionics Lab.

This paper presents a new method, called multi-cycle Q-modulation, which can be used in wireless power transmission (WPT) to modulate the quality factor (Q) of the receiver (Rx) coil and dynamically optimize the load impedance to maximize the power transfer efficiency (PTE) in two-coil links. This new multi-cycle Q-modulation method can be used to maintain high PTE in wirelessly powered applications that operate in dynamic environments with variable loading, such as implantable medical devices.

The award ceremony was preceded by a speech that highlighted Ougazzaden’s contributions in the creation of the Open Lab between Peugeot PSA, Georgia Tech, Georgia Tech-Lorraine, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), ENSAM ParisTech, and the Research Centre Henri Tudor at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, and that recognized his leadership in the agreement signed between PSA and Institut Lafayette.

Ougazzaden serves as the director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine and is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He is also the director of the affiliated GT-CNRS research laboratory and co-president of the newly created Institut Lafayette, a platform for innovation and technology transfer.

With its three world-renowned brands, Peugeot, Citroën, and DS, PSA Peugeot Citroën is the second largest carmaker in Europe and has sales operations in 160 countries. It is also involved in financing activities (Banque PSA Finance) and automotive equipment (Faurecia). Five years ago, PSA Peugeot Citroën built a network of science and technology partnerships. This network, called StelLab, means "Science & Technology Lean Lab." In the framework of this network, PSA has created 15 Open labs since 2011 in France, China, Brazil, and in the United States with Georgia Tech, to bring innovations from all scientific and technological fields to the vehicles of the future.

Photo caption: Sylvain Allano (right) presented the first International StelLab PSA Award to Abdallah Ougazzaden at the France-Atlanta Symposium on October 28.

Fleetwood’s paper, entitled “Optimizing the Vertical Profile of SiGe HBTs to Mitigate Radiation-Induced Upsets,” coauthored with Brian Wier, Uppili Raghunathan, Nelson Lourenco, Michael Oakley, Alvin Joseph, and John D. Cressler, presented a novel device modification to enable Gb/sec (processing speed) operation in a space radiation environment. By operating the device in reverse active, sensitive junction areas are significantly reduced and individual particle strikes have a substantially lower impact on device/circuit operation.

Fleetwood’s work presents, for the first time, processing-level modifications aimed directly at enhancing SiGe HBT (Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor) inverse-mode operation in an intense radiation environment. The results from this work show an increasing interest in SiGe HBTs for advanced space systems where cutting-edge solutions are necessary for burgeoning missions to Jupiter and Mars.

Fleetwood is a Ph.D. student at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is advised by Cressler, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics. This work is supported by Global Foundries and DTRA. 

Yezzi, who holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is one of over 1,200 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2015-2016 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement.

From February 1-June 30, 2016, Yezzi will be hosted within the Department of Chemical, Industrial, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Palermo in Italy. While at the University of Palermo, Yezzi will work on a project entitled “Geometric Partial Differential Equations for 3D Surface Reconstruction.”

Yezzi’s research specializes in using geometric partial differential equations (PDE) to extract shape information from raw signal/image data. Several applications in signal processing and computer vision, suitable for these specialized methods, are being studied at universities in southern Italy. The project would include a tutorial course/seminar series on geometric PDE methods to expose researchers to these alternative algorithms. While this tutorial would remain broad in the range of applications, the initial research focus would be computational 3D surface reconstruction, which could assist restoration efforts for historic, culturally important structures in southern Italy.

A member of the Georgia Tech ECE faculty since 1999, Yezzi directs the Lab of Computational Computer Vision, where he and his students conduct research in image processing, medical image analysis, computer vision, and shape optimization.

The title of the award-winning paper is “System-level variation-aware aging simulator using a unified novel gate-delay model for bias temperature instability, hot carrier injection, and gate oxide breakdown,” and it was published in Microelectronics and Reliability, vol. 55, nos. 9-10, pp. 1334-1340, August-September 2015.

The paper presents software that has been developed to estimate the lifetime of logic circuits due to a variety of front-end-of-line (FEOL) wearout mechanisms. It takes into account operating temperatures, IR drops, and stress probabilities while running benchmarks. It also takes into account system performance requirements, several FEOL wearout mechanisms (gate oxide breakdown, hot carrier injection, bias temperature instability), and a wide variety of use scenarios. Statistical analysis identifies critical paths and provides accurate estimates of the distribution of lifetimes under process, supply voltage, temperature, and aging variations. The software enables the replacement of arbitrary timing guardbands for aging with guardbands based on process data and system usage.

Read the entire story at TI E2E Community blog. 

Read more at the Advanced Technology Development Center blog. 

At this year’s IEEE-CICC, only two top ranked student papers were selected for this award by the wireless subcommittee, and both of these papers were from the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, led by Hua Wang, who holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship in ECE and who serves as Ph.D. advisor for both Park and Li.

Park’s award-winning paper is entitled, "A Highly Linear Dual-Band Mixed-Mode Polar Power Amplifier in CMOS with An Ultra-Compact Output Network," co-authored with Song Hu (an ECE Ph.D. student at the Georgia Tech GEMS Lab), Yanjie Wang (a staff scientist at Intel Labs), and Hua Wang. This work is based on a collaboration between the Georgia Tech GEMS Lab and Intel Labs.

There is an increasing interest in developing mixed-signal power amplifiers/transmitters in CMOS and employing them in next-generation wireless communication platforms. Such mixed-signal power amplifiers/transmitters explore the unparalleled computation capabilities in CMOS and leverage them to enhance large-signal radio-frequency performance, such as peak efficiency, back-off efficiency, and linearity. Park's paper exploits this mixed-signal power amplifier/transmitter design philosophy, and it proposes and demonstrates the world’s first highly linear digital polar power amplifier in a standard 65nm bulk CMOS process. The power amplifier is capable of operating at dual-frequencies without any band-selection switch or tuning element. Park's IC chip achieves the state-of-the-art performance of +28.1dBm/+26.0dBm power amplifier output power with 40.7%/27.0% drain efficiency at 2.6/4.5GHz. Mixed-signal linearization techniques allow the power amplifier to amplify a 256-QAM signal with 2.05%/1.03% EVM and +21.51dBm/+19.27dBm average output power at 2.35/4.7GHz.

Li’s award-winning paper is entitled "A 2-24GHz 360-Degree Full-Span Differential Vector Modulator Phase Rotator with Transformer-Based Poly-Phase Quadrature Network," co-authored with Park and Hua Wang. This work is based on a collaboration between the Georgia Tech GEMS Lab and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

One of the major challenges in modern broadband phased-array systems is the synthesis of high-precision, phase-shifted radar signals for high-quality beam-forming. Existing broadband phase-shifting approaches often require frequency-dependent calibration tables or tuning elements, which inevitably complicate their use in in-field defense applications. Moreover, no reported designs can perform high-precision 360-degree phase shifting over a decade-wide bandwidth.

Li's paper addresses this unmet challenge by proposing and demonstrating a broadband vector modulator phase rotator based on a novel transformer-based polyphase network, achieving a first-ever decade-wide instantaneous bandwidth (2GHz-24GHz). The phase rotator is implemented in a standard 65nm bulk CMOS process. The maximum rms phase error is only 1.22 degrees within 1.5dB amplitude variation for full 360-degree phase interpolation from 2GHz to 24GHz. Li's design does not require any frequency tuning element, band selection switches, or frequency-dependent code compensation/look-up table. Such a unique "one-code-for-all-frequency" solution facilitates the development and deployment of ultra-broadband large-scaled phased-array systems. 

Pictured in photo left to right at IEEE-CICC: Jong Seok Park, Don Thelen of ON Semiconductor and the IEEE-CICC Conference Chair, Tso-Wei Li, and Hua Wang.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Amaravati was honored for his paper entitled “A Time Interleaved DAC Sharing SAR Pipeline ADC for Ultra-Low Power Camera Front Ends." This paper presents a novel ADC architecture that can perform in-situ inner product on analog data with digital coefficients while enabling wide-input. The proposed design in 130nm CMOS process advances energy efficiency of the state-of-the-art designs by an order of magnitude and is particularly suited for low-power camera (and other sensor) front-ends.

Amaravati’s coauthors on this paper are Manan Chugh, an ECE graduate student, and Arijit Raychowdhury, who holds the ON Semiconductor Junior Professorship and who serves as Amaravati’s Ph.D. advisor.

TECHCON is organized annually by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to showcase a selected set of SRC-sponsored research.

This is the second year in a row that Kar has received an SRC Best in Session Award. This year, he received the honor in the Power Management for Circuit Design session for his paper, "A Scalable Hybrid Regulator for Down Conversion of High Input Voltage Using Low Voltage Devices,” co-authored with his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay and fellow ECE Ph.D. student Khondker Zakir Ahmed.

Their work focuses on delivering high quality power with regulated voltage to digital processors, which is a critically sought goal for today’s high performance mobile systems. A critical challenge in achieving that goal is to bring higher voltage (higher than the voltage rating of the devices) closer to the silicon processor. Delivering high voltage directly to the processor chip reduces the conduction losses through the package and PCB traces. If down-conversion of high voltages can be realized using conventional CMOS devices, it will open pathways for seamless integration of regulators with digital microprocessors and will help reduce system volume.

This work presents a unique voltage regulator, referred to as a hybrid regulator, to address this challenge. The hybrid regulator consists of a switched capacitor voltage regulator, followed by an inductive buck regulator. This high conversion ratio hybrid regulator architecture is demonstrated in 130nm standard CMOS technology. Major challenges addressed are sustenance of high voltage stress while using only low voltage digital transistors, safe startup, improvement of low-load efficiency, and load-dependent variable frequency operation.

Their paper entitled, “Long Range and Low Powered RFID Tags with Tunnel Diodes,” demonstrates how to combine antennas with quantum tunneling devices to produce ultra-low powered means of wireless communications over extraordinarily long distances. Two of the student authors — Amato and Peterson — co-presented the paper in Tokyo. Amato and Akbar are currently Ph.D. students in Professor Gregory D. Durgin’s research group at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), while Christopher Peterson (who performed the research as an undergraduate student in Durgin's group) began graduate studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign this fall.

Coincidentally, the conference’s Best Overall Paper Award went to Azhar Hasan for his paper entitled, “Towards Pervasive Soil Moisture Sensing using RFID Tag Antenna-Based Sensors.” Hasan recently started working as an assistant professor in Pakistan, having received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech ECE, where he was advised by Professor Andrew F. Peterson.

With the support of a five-year, $2.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation National Research Traineeship program, this faculty team will create new bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs and concentrations in healthcare robotics – the first degree programs in this area in the United States.

Led by Ayanna M. Howard, the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), this initiative will blend Emory’s medical and clinical expertise and Tech’s robotics and engineering know-how to train engineering students in robotics, physiology, neuroscience, rehabilitation, and psychology. The program also aims to increase the appeal of STEM fields to a wide range of people, including women, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities.

The U.S. population is living longer and is becoming older and more racially and ethnically diverse. In addition, the number of younger people living with a lifelong disability is also increasing, including 52,351 post-9/11 military veterans with combat injuries and 6.4 million children with developmental disorders or delays. Fifty million people are also diagnosed annually with neurological/neurodegenerative diseases. “Providing innovative solutions to help improve an individual’s quality of life continues to emerge as a growing need,” said Howard, who leads the Human-Automation Systems Lab in ECE. “Keeping this need in mind, we will train engineers not only to develop robotics technologies, but also learn how to work with and listen to the needs of the technology end users – patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.”

Three faculty join Howard’s leadership team. Charlie Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University and director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab in BME, focuses on intelligent mobile robots for physical assistance in the context of healthcare. Lena H. Ting, a BME professor with an appointment in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy, and co-director of the Neural Engineering Center, will integrate human needs related to accessibility and rehabilitation to inform the design of robotics solutions.

Randy D. Trumbower, an assistant professor in both BME and Physical Therapy and the director of research within Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory, will work on interfacing robotics and physical therapy techniques.

Additional faculty will serve as student advisors, including Wendy Rogers, professor in Tech’s School of Psychology; Jun Ueda, an associate professor from Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Steven L. Wolf, a professor in Emory’s Division of Physical Therapy; and Minoru Shinohara, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Applied Physiology.

The team will focus first on developing the doctoral and master’s programs, with the goal of having a mini-cohort of Ph.D. students in spring 2016 and starting the official graduate degree programs next fall. The undergraduate degree will combine the five-year, B.S./M.S. degree program and undergraduate thesis option, allowing students to build a foundation for an eventual M.S. thesis. The graduate program will build on the highly successful multidisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech. “We’re excited about this opportunity to further enhance and grow our world-class educational programs in robotics,” said Kemp, who has served on the robotics Ph.D. program’s leadership team since its inception in 2007.

A sampling of these courses include:

•        Interfacing Engineering and Rehabilitation, taught by Trumbower, engages both engineering and clinical students. They will learn equally from clinical experts about their target demographics and the issues they face and from engineering faculty about how robotics can address these challenges. Members from collaborating medical organizations and non-profit agencies will regularly visit the class to talk with students. Discussion points and group projects will be derived from real case studies using persons with physical challenges as technology consumers and consultants.

“In order for clinicians to play a more active role in the development, evaluation, and implementation of robotics technologies in rehabilitation, they must first more comfortably engage engineers who develop and test these technologies,” said Trumbower. “Mutually, in order for engineers to play a more active role in the development, evaluation, and implementation of rehabilitation technologies, they must first more comfortably engage clinicians who evaluate and treat patients. This course provides a novel learning approach for this type of collaborative interaction.”

•        A course on ethics, privacy, and regulations in medicine and biomedical robotics will be offered, where students learn about considerations that must be addressed when designing and deploying robotic systems for health. “While engineering students at Tech are required to take ethics courses, certain areas like privacy or statistical analysis have different nuances in the healthcare arena,” said Howard. “For instance, what does ‘good’ mean as a healthcare roboticist vs. a traditional roboticist? How do you manage privacy and share information from doctor to doctor, and is there a correlation to a robot in the doctor’s office doing the same thing with a robot in a patient’s home?”

•        Interdisciplinary research training will provide students with hands-on, healthcare experience during their first summer in the program. Matched with mentors in both engineering and healthcare, students will do one week of clinical rotations, where they will observe medical practices and learn about current problems in healthcare.

Students will then conduct eight weeks of research using robotics to address healthcare issues discovered during rotations. Clinical partners with which students may work include Emory Medical School, Shepherd Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory ALS Center, Atlanta Area Agency on Aging, and the Veterans Administration.

Additional components of the healthcare robotics degree programs are required communications training and availability of entrepreneurship activities for interested students. All students will receive communications training, so that they can interact effectively with different audiences. Examples include academic and professional communications; talking to patients or patient groups about their work; giving media interviews, writing press releases, and producing short videos about their work; and communicating with the general public. Trainees interested in entrepreneurship will be able to participate in a Georgia Tech student incubator during their second summer in the program, or they may intern at a medical startup company in the Atlanta area.

Working with engineering students to think about and design their technologies for the benefit of their target populations will be an exciting challenge, according to Howard. “Working in healthcare robotics will be a learning process, where there is no equation in the book that can be derived. It will require looking at a problem, working and talking with others, and developing a solution by being creative and thinking outside of the box,” said Howard. “This will be a different way of thinking for engineers, and when our students graduate, they will be exceptional because of that.” 

Sources for statistics: National Center for Education Statistics, Congressional Research Service/U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

This award is given to a young engineer who presented an outstanding paper at the European Microwave Conference and who is under the age of 30, the first author on the paper, and the presenter in an oral or poster session.

Pavlidis’ work was sponsored by I2R Nanowave, based in Atlanta, as well as by his Air Force Research Lab (AFRL)/Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellowship. He is co-advised by ECE Professors Oliver Brand and John Papapolymerou.

Pavlidis was recognized for his paper entitled “A 5.4W X-Band Gallium Nitride (GaN) Power Amplifier in an Encapsulated Organic Package;” his coauthors on the paper are Ahmet Cagri Ulusoy, a research engineer in the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC), and Papapolymerou.

High performance radar and telecommunications systems place stringent requirements on both electronics and packaging. In recent years, GaN, a wide bandgap semiconductor compound from the III-V groups in the periodic table, has received much attention due to its ability to handle high power and operate at microwave- and millimeter-wave frequencies. Therefore, power amplifiers (PAs) made with GaN technology are characterized by large power densities and have been traditionally wire-bonded on high thermal conductivity substrates, such as copper (Cu) or aluminum nitride (AlN). These materials are expensive and/or lossy, which can limit the overall system's performance. On the other hand, liquid crystal polymer (LCP), an organic laminate that is low-cost, ultra thin (down to 25 microns), near hermetic, and low-loss up to 170 GHz has been overlooked due to its poor thermal conductivity.

In the team's work, this thermal limitation is overcome through using a multi-layer stack-up of LCP that permits a GaN device or MMIC to be encapsulated within the package structure, while simultaneously attaching the backside of the chip to a heatsink. Moreover, the chip is flip-chip bonded instead of wire-bonded, reducing interconnect parasitics and improving wideband performance. The thermal performance of the package and its impact on device reliability were evaluated using a combination of infrared (IR) temperature and pulsed current-voltage (I-V) measurements. Ultimately, the full potential of this package was demonstrated through the design, fabrication, and characterization of an X-Band (8-12 GHz) PA. At 10.2 GHz, the PA showed a power added efficiency (PAE) of 38% and saturated output power (PSAT) of 5.4W under continuous-wave (CW) operation, or 49% PAE and 7W PSAT when pulsed at 50% duty cycle.

This is the first time that an encapsulated flip-chip based package using organics has been demonstrated for reliable and high-power operation of GaN amplifiers. With the thermal and RF performance of this package verified, future work will focus on the design of a wideband PA in order to leverage the advantages of the flip-chip interconnect.

This team’s paper was also recognized as a top four finalist for the overall EuMC Microwave Prize for the best contributed paper to the conference. Approximately 900 papers were submitted for consideration, of which only 50% were accepted for presentation and publication. Therefore, the paper was considered to be in the top 4 out of 450 entries, or in the top 1%.

Cutline for group photo: Pictured with Spyros Pavlidis (center) are Wilhelm Gruener (left), employee of Airbus Defence and Space, which sponsored the EuMC Young Engineer Prize, and Jean-François Villemazet (right), employee of Thales Alenia Space and EuMC 2015 co-chair.

A professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Swaminathan received the award for his paper entitled, “Enabling Antenna Design with Nano-magnetic Materials Using Machine Learning.” His coauthors on the paper are his ECE faculty colleagues, Rao Tummala and Raj Pulugurtha, and his colleagues from the University of L’Aquila (Italy), Carmine Gianfagna and Giulio Antonini.

Magneto-dielectric materials enable antenna miniaturization. Since magneto dielectrics are synthesized from magnetic particles and polymer dielectrics, the dimensions of the particles and their volume fraction need to be controlled carefully to obtain the required antenna performance. In this paper, machine learning methods were used to determine the particle size and volume fraction to obtain the desired antenna properties such as gain, bandwidth, radiation efficiency, and resonant frequency.

Swaminathan holds the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics and is the director of the Interconnect and Packaging Center. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1994 and has been a member of the ECE faculty since 1997.

Harris, a communications and technology company, employs more than 700 electrical engineers worldwide, and many Georgia Tech alumni are a part of the Harris workforce.

“We look forward to continuing our engagement with Georgia Tech students in an even more meaningful way and over the long-term. Many of the brightest minds we have on our team are alumni of Georgia Tech. We rely on both their foundational knowledge and creativity to solve our clients’ biggest challenges,” said William C. Majette, senior engineering manager in Space and Intelligence Systems at Harris Corporation.

The endowment will benefit the more than 800 members of Georgia Tech’s IEEE student chapter by providing ongoing funds for competitions, workshops, and leadership and networking opportunities.

“We are incredibly grateful for this opportunity and hope that the relationship we have built over the years with Harris Corporation will continue to flourish,” said Jenny Hunter, chair of the Georgia Tech IEEE student branch.

In addition to the gift given to the IEEE student chapter, Harris has also donated $2 million to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) that will support the renovation of the Van Leer Building Rotunda into a multi-level, interdisciplinary makerspace. The project will break ground in fall 2016 and will be completed in 2017.

http://www.atlantatechedge.com/webonly/default.aspx

View the roundtable discussion. 

Howard placed at #92 on the list and was recognized for her innovations in robotics research and education. She was also lauded for her work as founder and chief technology officer at Zyrobotics, a startup company focused on robotics education and assistive technologies, especially as they relate to children with disabilities.

A faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2005, Howard holds the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in Bioengineering and leads the Human-Automation Systems Lab. Before coming to Tech, she worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she led robotic projects utilizing vision, fuzzy logic, and neural network methodologies.

To learn more, read Howard’s profile and the entire article at The Root website.

The major applications segments of gallium nitride (GaN)-based materials are Light Emitting Diodes and laser diodes used for displays, optical storage, vehicle lamps, and RF devices for communications and high power modules for power distribution, industrial systems, heavy electrical systems, turbines, and smart grid power systems. The potential market size of these massive applications of GaN is currently in the billions of dollars.

As a result of this successful demo, a new lab has been contracted for this new system, valued at more than $2 million. The lab construction and the equipment is funded by industry, FEDER (European funds), the Region of Lorraine, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and GTL.

The state-of-the-art, 3x2-inch or 1x4-inch wafer configuration Close Coupled Showerhead (CCS) system features high temperature growth capabilities of up to 1300°C and EPITT and EPICURVE, two sophisticated in situ-monitoring systems that enable better process and control to explore “higher temperature” growth regimes that suit advanced and innovative materials development.

The versatile CCS concept is recognized as a robust route to uniformity and scalability to mass production, which is attractive for industry-oriented research, according to Abdallah Ougazzaden, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and GTL director.

“The CCS system perfectly matches our R&D plans in respect of GaN, InN, AlN, BN and related alloys,” said Ougazzaden, who also leads the MOCVD Lab at GTL. “This CCS MOCVD tool will be dedicated to the growth of nitride alloy R&D materials and device structures for light emitting sources, solar cells, sensors, and other applications depending on how the semiconductor market evolves.”

Using this system, GTL’s researchers demonstrated full LED structures and High Electron Mobility Transistors with the state-of-the-art performances.

Based in Metz, France at the GTL campus, the UMI-Georgia Tech-CNRS is an international research laboratory established between Georgia Tech and CNRS. The lab currently works on projects in non-linear optics and dynamics, smart materials, and computer science.

Cutlines for photos (top to bottom):

Picture 1 – CCS MOCVD installed and commissioned at the UMI-Georgia Tech-CNRS in Metz, France.

Picture 2 – A full 2-inch LED device wafer grown using the CCS MOCVD emitting blue light.

Picture 3 – ECE Professor Abdallah Ougazzaden loads the susceptor of MOCVD system.

Raychowdhury has been an associate professor on the ECE faculty since January 2013, where he leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab and advises six Ph.D. students and two master’s students. Prior to joining Tech, Raychowdhury was a research scientist at Intel for five years and graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2007.

Raychowdhury’s research interests include low power digital and mixed-signal circuit design and exploring interactions of circuits with device technologies. His recent research, after joining Georgia Tech, has been published in top journals and conferences, including Nature SR, Journal of Applied Physics, International Solid State Circuits Conference, and the International Electron Device Meeting.

To date, Raychowdhury holds more than 25 U.S. and international patents and has published over 100 articles in journals and refereed conferences. He is the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design and the editor of the Microelectronics Journal. He also serves on a number of technical program committees for conferences.

Raychowdhury recently became ECE’s first recipient of the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, which is aimed at supporting research for new faculty members within the first two years of their tenure position. Prior to his arrival at Tech, he won the Intel Labs Technical Contribution Award in 2011, several best paper honors, and top awards for his doctoral research while at Purdue University. Raychowdhury is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

SRC, the world’s leading university-research consortium for semiconductor technologies, is managing the initiative through its Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (SRC-NRI) and STARnet Research programs. The research will be led by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Azad Naeemi, associate professor, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Benchmarking guides university research funded through SRC — enabling concise communication of research outcomes, focusing researchers' attention on key technical challenges and sparking invention,” said Tom Theis, executive director of SRC-NRI. “Professor Naeemi's research is expected to take benchmarking of emerging devices to a new level of sophistication.”

Evaluating the performance of devices in representative "benchmark" circuits is a well-established engineering practice in the semiconductor industry. However, this new program is the first to develop a comparable methodology for evaluating the relative capabilities of emerging devices.

These emerging devices include, for example, transistor-like “steep slope” devices that can operate at very low voltage and, therefore, very low power, and non-volatile magnetic devices that combine the functions of logic and memory. The new devices operate by a variety of principles fundamentally different from those governing the operation of established silicon field-effect transistor technology.

In recent years, benchmarking of these devices has steadily increased in rigor. The Georgia Tech team — selected by a group of SRC member companies supporting the initiative including IBM, Intel Corporation, Micron Technology and Texas Instruments — will build on this foundation.

“This research will also enable selection of the most promising emerging devices for technology transfer to SRC member companies and for continued development in future SRC research programs,” said Gilroy Vandentop, executive director of STARnet Research.

Besides maintaining and improving the established benchmarking methodology, the Georgia Tech team is tasked with developing and evaluating benchmark circuits to better understand the potential of new devices for memory arrays, to explore and quantify the value of non-volatility and to measure the impact of various ways of implementing device-to-device connections. Perhaps most challenging, Naeemi will lead the development of a rigorous benchmarking methodology for non-Boolean (analog) computational circuits being explored for future applications such as artificial neural networks.

“Our team is chartered with maintaining and improving the established benchmarking methodology for emerging devices, evaluating the potential performance of the various SRC-NRI and STARnet devices in the established benchmark circuits,” said Naeemi. “We will incorporate additional device concepts as they emerge through ongoing research, and we will develop additional benchmark circuits to better understand the capabilities of these devices.”

The SRC benchmark program is a two-and-a-half year effort that funds research from July 1, 2015 through the close of 2017. For more information on the program, visit https://www.src.org/program/nri/benchmarking/.

Caption for Switching Energy versus Delay of a 32-Bit Adder: Benchmarking results: Assessment of energy versus delay of a 32-bit adder circuit if it were built with various devices being explored in the Semiconductor Research Corporation's NRI and STARnet programs (Source: Dimitri Nikonov and Ian Young from Intel Co.).

Caption for Smart Detector Cell: This circuit built from spintronic devices is being studied for possible addition to the established suite of SRC benchmark circuits (Source: H. Aghasi and R.M. Iraei from Cornell University and Georgia Tech).  

Prior to joining Tech, Emelianov was on the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, he served as the Cockrell Professor of Biomedical Engineering and as an adjunct professor of imaging physics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. His research interests are in the development of advanced imaging methods capable of detecting and diagnosing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other pathologies.

Emelianov also focuses on assisting treatment planning, enhancing image-guided therapy, and monitoring of treatment outcomes. He has led a team that discovered a minimally invasive way to detect plaques that are most likely to cause heart attacks. He has also conducted groundbreaking work on deep vein thrombosis, predicting rupture of plaques for cardiovascular applications, and imaging sentinel lymph nodes and micrometastases for cancer.

Emelianov and his collaborators have published over 470 refereed journal and conference papers and 13 edited books and book chapters, and he has 15 patents that have either been issued or are pending. In serving his professional community, Emelianov is the editor of Photoacoustics and is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

Emelianov has held leadership roles in ultrasonics conferences and symposia sponsored by both IEEE and SPIE. In addition, he is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was also elected to the College of Fellows for the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011.

While at UT-Austin, Emelianov served as the BME associate chair for research and chair of the undergraduate curriculum committee, and he received several teaching awards at both the department and university levels. He has graduated 20 Ph.D. students and four M.S. students, many of whom have received fellowships, national research service awards, and honors and awards from both IEEE and SPIE. He has also advised 45 undergraduate researchers.

An ECE faculty member since 2004, Divan works in the areas of dynamic grid control, advanced and integrated power electronics, and sustainable energy systems. He is known for his seminal work in technologies that protect equipment against power disturbances that impact industries such as utilities, semiconductors, automotive, and food processing. He served as director for the Intelligent Power Infrastructure Consortium, a university-industry-utility consortium to foster and accelerate the development and adoption of early-stage, pre-competitive high-risk and high-impact technologies in power applications.

For the last several years, Divan has been on leave in order to establish and lead his third startup company, Varentec, which is funded by leading VCs Khosla Ventures and investor Bill Gates. Varentec, based in Santa Clara, California, builds distributed power management and monitoring solutions for the electric grid. Divan currently serves as the scientific founder and Chief Scientist for the company. He is also the scientific founder of two additional companies–Innovolt, based in Atlanta, which makes next-generation power protection and asset management devices and where he serves on the Board, and Soft Switching Technologies Corporation, where he served as CEO and developed a range of devices to help manufacturing facilities ride through power disturbances. At Soft Switching, Divan also conceptualized and helped to develop the I-Grid, the first publicly accessible Internet-based power monitoring network in the U.S., which allows industries and utilities to diagnose widespread power quality events and unsolved downtime events. Soft Switching was acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2012. Finally, his work at Georgia Tech has provided the foundation for another start-up company – Smart Wires, which is located in Oakland, California, and provides power flow control devices for the transmission grid.

Divan holds more than 60 issued or pending patents, with over half in use by industry, and he has published over 300 refereed journal and conference papers, including 12 outstanding prize paper awards.

In 2015, Divan was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He served as president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) in 2009-2010, and he was named as the first recipient of the IEEE Newell Field Medal, the highest honor given by IEEE in the area of power electronics “for leadership in the development of soft-switching power converters.” Divan also served as an IEEE Industry Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2004 and 2005, and he was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1998.

The team – consisting of ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay, his Ph.D. student Wen Yueh, ME Professor Yogendra Joshi, and his Ph.D. student Zhimin Wan – received the award at ISLPED 2015 on July 22 in Rome, Italy for their paper entitled “Experimental Characterization of In-Package Microfluidic Cooling on a System-on-Chip." It also marks the second straight year that Mukhopadhyay and a student from his research group, known as the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab, have won this award for their work on electro-thermal co-design and thermal management of integrated circuits. Joshi leads the Microelectronics and Emerging Technologies Thermal Lab in the Woodruff School.

Thermal management has always been a major challenge in high-performance processors. Today, even mobile and embedded systems on chip (SoCs) are becoming thermally limited as consumers need more and more performance from these devices, but they are limited by stringent constraints on volume, footprint, user experience, and cost.

The team aims to address the thermal challenges in mobile SoCs, and they have experimentally demonstrated in-package microfluidic cooling on a commercial SoC. To develop this technique, the team fabricated an interposer with micro pinfin-based fluidic cooling and successfully attached it to a commercial SoC. A piezoelectric pump, controlled by the SoC, was integrated in the system to demonstrate closed-loop control. Experiments using benchmark applications showed in-package fluidic cooling improves the SoC’s energy efficiency and reduces the design footprint compared to external passive cooling solutions.

The contribution of the work is a simple, yet effective approach to integrated chip-scale microfluidic cooling in a commercial-off-the-shelf device, and its experimental demonstration using a commercial SoC, namely Snapdragon boards donated by Qualcomm, to support power and thermal management research at Georgia Tech.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Song was awarded this distinction for his paper, “Managing Performance-Reliability Tradeoffs in Multicore Processors”, co-authored with ECE Professors Sudhakar Yalamanchili (who is Song’s Ph.D. advisor) and Saibal Mukhopadhyay. 

A fundamental trade-off exists between processor performance and lifetime reliability, and high throughput operations increase power and heat dissipation, which have an adverse impact on lifetime reliability. In contrast, lifetime reliability favors low utilization to reduce stresses and avoid failures.

A key challenge in understanding this tradeoff is in connecting application characteristics to device-level degradation behaviors. Using a full-system microarchitecture and physics simulation framework, the research team analyzed the performance-reliability tradeoff in a multicore processor by introducing a new metric, throughput-lifetime product (TLP). The team’s research findings produced new techniques to effectively manage tradeoffs between lifetime reliability and performance. 

Song's work was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) through an SRC Graduate Fellowship.

CRII is a new program under the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF. It is aimed at supporting research for new faculty members within the first two years of their tenure-track position. This two-year-long award will support Raychowdhury’s research in the area of novel controls strategies for embedded DC-DC converters and voltage regulators targeted for low-power digital circuits.

Raychowdhury has been a member of the ECE faculty since January 2013 where he leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab. Prior to joining Tech, he was a research scientist at Intel for five years and graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2007. Raychowdhury’s research interests include low power digital and mixed-signal circuit design, design of power converters and sensors, and exploring interactions of circuits with device technologies. 

Howard started working at Georgia Tech ECE in 2005, where she serves as the director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab. Prior to her appointment as the Smith Chair, she held the Motorola Foundation Professorship for three years. In addition, she served as the chair of the Institute’s multidisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program.

Howard's area of research is centered on the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive ability into the control path of autonomous systems. Her work has resulted in over 180 peer-reviewed publications about projects ranging from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments to assistive robots for the home. Some new research directions include robotic applications for child therapy and rehabilitation, telepresence for persons with visual impairments, haptic and wearable device interfaces, behavior modeling for diagnosis and intervention, and medical and health care mobile apps.

Howard is the founder and chief technology officer of Zyrobotics, LLC. Launched in September 2013, the company is commercializing assistive technology that enables children with limited mobility to operate tablet computers, smart phones, toys, gaming apps, and interactive robots.

To date, Howard’s work has been highlighted through a number of awards, articles, and televised interviews and programs, including USA Today, TIME Magazine, CNN, and American Public Television. Her recent awards include the 2013 Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award; the 2008 Georgia Tech Faculty Woman of Distinction Award; the 2008 ECE Outreach Award; the 2009 Janice A. Lumpkin Educator of the Year Award, given by the National Society of Black Engineers; and the 2014 A. Richard Newton ABIE Award. In 2015, Howard was named as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

The Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is committed to increasing the diversity and the quality of the ECE student body. Overall, undergraduate and graduate student enrollments continue to rise, and females comprise 21% of the incoming freshman class – its highest mark ever. This is the third consecutive year that women have made up at least 20% of ECE first year students, while the School’s overall female enrollment also continues to grow. During the last five years, overall undergraduate enrollment has grown from 1,207 to 1,473, while the percentage of undergraduate women enrolled increased from 9% to 15%. Accordingly, overall graduate enrollment has grown from 1,170 to 1,359, while the percentage of graduate women enrolled increased from 14% to 16%.

In recent years, ECE has increased its recruiting efforts with the help of two student groups, the ECE Ambassadors and Women in ECE (WECE), to provide more personal interactions with prospective students. According to Bonnie Ferri, ECE associate chair for undergraduate affairs, between 200-300 prospective students tour ECE each year, and the School’s HOT DAYS camp for high school students and the College of Engineering TEC camp for middle school girls provide more in-depth experiences to get students interested in ECE.  

“Our recruiting message has changed in recent years to reflect the change in our program to one that is more flexible and customizable, a feature that is especially attractive to young women,” said Ferri. “With so many electives in ECE and approved electives, it is easier for students to seek minors, study abroad, or specialize in specific areas. A new initiative in ECE that is focused on engineering for social innovation also has a strong appeal for women.”

The STEP-UP Program, a summer research experience for high school teachers, has also played a key role in the School’s outreach efforts to attract both female and underrepresented minority students, according to ECE Outreach Director Leyla Conrad. “We have worked with more than 35 Metro Atlanta high school physics and engineering teachers for the last 10 years,” said Conrad. “After their summer research experience, these teachers bring some of their students to campus to tour ECE research labs during the academic year. Every year, that means more than 300 students get to see and learn about the School and what it has to offer, and up to 1,000-1,500 students hear and learn about ECE from these teachers in their high school classrooms.”

Two female ECE students shared their appreciation for both the rigor of the academics and the variety of experiences that come with attending Georgia Tech and going to college in a city like Atlanta. They also appreciate having a social and networking organization like WECE.

 “I love that I can study abroad, be a sister in Alpha Gamma Delta, play in a band at Under the Couch, serve as a Peer Mentor to autistic students, teach programming to children in the i3 Experience, and work with a supportive group of women through WECE while earning a degree at one of the best universities in the world!” said Bailey Bercik, an electrical engineering major. “I couldn't imagine a better college experience. The possibilities here are endless.”

“WECE attracted my attention because it was a concentration of intelligent, motivated women who sought to expand their own education outside of the classroom and unite other female students in their field,” said Caitlyn Caggia, an electrical engineering major. “The range of opportunities WECE offered, from ice cream socials and ice skating to personalized discussions with top companies, was highly appealing to me as an incoming student looking for guidance.”

Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE, praised WECE; the ECE Ambassadors; and the faculty, staff, students, and area high school teachers who have been involved in the School’s recruiting efforts over the last decade, and he looks forward to continued success.

“The results of these individuals’ hard work is seen through the growing enrollments in ECE, and we will continue to work on increasing our enrollments and further increasing the diversity of our student body while providing excellent academic programs and research experiences,” McLaughlin said. “But perhaps, more importantly, we want everyone who majors in ECE to know that they are welcome here and that we will provide an environment where they will be encouraged to succeed.”

As an undergraduate computer engineering major, English joined the Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) program in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech. The ORS program is an academic enrichment program that matches two or three undergraduate ECE students with a Ph.D. mentor. Undergraduate students broaden on their coursework and apply their skills to real research projects under the guidance of a faculty advisor and graduate mentor during the course of their studies.

Already fascinated by robotics and space applications from her work at Tyndall, English chose an ORS project in Professor Ayanna Howard’s lab. Her team developed software that allowed a robot to create high-definition topographic maps of Mars and other locations where GPS isn’t an option. When English decided to attend graduate school, the in-depth research under Howard’s tutelage caused her to narrow her focus to robotics, in particular rehabilitative and assistive robotics—a specialization of Professor Howard’s, who now serves as English’s Ph.D. advisor.

Now English’s graduate research is an ORS project and she is mentoring a fresh new crop of ECE undergraduates.

“When I was an undergraduate, I benefitted greatly from the ORS program. I was exposed to research in academia for the first time; received guidance with classes, research, and scholarships from my mentor; completed my first publication in an IEEE conference; and got a sneak peek into the life of a graduate student. I decided to become an ORS mentor in order to give similar opportunities to other undergraduate students,” English said.

Her team, consisting of computer engineering major Jennifer Hunter, and electrical engineering majors Jonathan Tuck and Gueorgui Tzintzarov, recently attended the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Conference where they were finalists in the Student Design Competition for their Robotic Exoskeleton and Tablet Gaming Suite device.

“This was an excellent experience for the undergraduates, because it awarded them a publication, experience presenting at a conference, and networking opportunities with other experts in the field,” English said.

Their wearable device, which fits over the wrist and arm and pairs with an interactive game on a tablet, facilitates physical therapy for patients with limited motor function. It also makes therapy more fun for patients that need to regain strength in their wrists and hands—a key factor in perceived quality of life—allowing them to do exercises at home and keeping them engaged for longer than traditional physical therapy sessions.

While wearable robotic prosthetics exist for use in rehabilitation, English’s technology takes them to a new level. Hers is the first solution that is available in more sizes than the current one-size-fits-all wearable that is only effectively used by the average adult male. Because the device’s exoskeleton is 3-D printed, it can be sized for all types of patients, including children. In the future, the hope is that a medical professional can input specific measurements and print out a customized exoskeleton for each user.

While participation in ORS has afforded the undergraduates unique opportunities in the world of research, English has also benefitted. Each student took an active, hands-on role in the research. Tuck and Tzintzarov used Solidworks software to design the exoskeletons and printed them in the Invention Studio. Hunter used Java and Android Studio to develop two interactive games, Robo Blaster and Robo Rock ‘n Roll, that pair with the devices.

“As an ORS Ph.D. mentor, I wanted to give back and give undergraduates some of the same opportunities I had. It turns out that having these students on my research team has been invaluable. They each brought a unique perspective and specific skills to the table. I only hope I’ve taught them as much as they have taught me,” English said.

SRC’s support of faculty- and student-led research at Georgia Tech has produced key research findings in areas such as mixed-signal integrated circuits, silicon germanium BiCMOS technology, RF design, system-on-a-chip, multi-core architectures, 3D integrated circuits integration and CAD, post-CMOS spintronic interconnects, packaging technologies, and CMOS multi-modality sensing platforms for chemical detection and drug development.

Forty-four patents have been issued to Georgia Tech faculty based on SRC research, and 95 graduate students and 12 post-docs have been supported by SRC funds. Many of these students have gone on to work at SRC member companies after graduating from Georgia Tech.

“SRC has enjoyed a tremendous and productive relationship with Georgia Tech for more than 30 years, and we’re pleased to receive recognition from the university as we collectively salute this collaborative effort of advancing technology,” said Ken Hansen, SRC president and CEO.

The SRC-Georgia Tech partnership involves several research programs, including SRC’s Global Research Collaboration (GRC), STARnet, the Nanotechnology Research Initiative (NRI) and the SRC Education Alliance (SCREA).

Other notable contributions include Professor Emeritus Jim Meindl’s projects on gigascale integration and the Center for Advanced Interconnect Science and Technology. Meindl and Regents’ Professor Paul Kohl, of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering respectively, also acquired almost $81 million in funding from the joint DARPA/SRC-funded Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation for the SRC Interconnect Focus Center (IFC) from 1998 to 2012. Additionally, SRC funding of $2.4 million established the Interconnect and Packaging Center (IPC) as an SRC Center of Excellence at Georgia Tech in 2009 for research focused on 3D technologies leading to 3D IC technology innovation, exploration, and discoveries.

ECE Professors Madhavan Swaminathan, Sung Kyu Lim, and Muhannad Bakir presented updates on their SRC-funded research during the induction ceremony. Bakir, a former SRC student and current SRC-funded faculty, said he is proud to have been a part of the SRC community for the past 15 years.

“I can attest to the unique environment SRC creates for its students, faculty, and member companies,” Bakir said. “As a student, I interacted directly with company research mentors who enriched my research program, helped me refine my focus, and aided my professional growth. SRC funds cutting-edge research programs that are rich in interdisciplinary collaboration. This is the SRC hallmark – excellence in research program development with student and faculty mentoring from the best minds of our industry.”

In addition, Georgia Tech hosted SRC’s summer strategy session and board retreat. The session brought leaders from the semiconductor industry and research universities across the country together to discuss three upcoming areas of research focus: Semiconductor Synthetic Biology, the Innovative and Intelligent Internet of Things, and Efficiency and Performance for Connectivity Constrained Computing.

“We look forward to many years of continuing our research partnerships with SRC and especially supporting the new areas of focus that have been identified as the future of the semiconductor industry by experts from the field,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, ECE’s Steve W. Chaddick School Chair.

Written for the Semiconductor Research Corporation by Dan Francisco of Integrity Global Management, dan@IntegrityGlobal.biz, 916-812-8814

A professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tentzeris and his coauthors will be recognized for their paper entitled “Inkjet-printed antennas, sensors, and circuits on paper substrate,” published in the July 2013 edition of this journal. Most of the work presented in the paper was performed by the ATHENA Group, which is led by Tentzeris.

This paper introduces inkjet printing on flexible paper and additive manufacturing/digital printing technologies for the sustainable “green” ultra-low-cost fabrication of flexible RF/microwave electronics, antennas, and sensors. The novel integrated wireless sensor and antenna modules reported in this paper could potentially set the foundation for the truly convergent wireless sensor ad-hoc networks of the future with enhanced cognitive intelligence and “zero-power” operability through ambient energy harvesting and wireless power transfer. The reported results could find applications in numerous areas ranging from the Internet of Things and smart skins to smart cities, intelligent cars, and smart biomonitoring devices.

Tentzeris’ coauthors on the paper are Sangkil Kim of Qualcomm; Benjamin Cook of Texas Instruments; Taoran Le, a Ph.D. student in the ATHENA Lab; James Cooper, a Ph.D. alumnus of the ATHENA Lab; Hoseon Lee, an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University; Vasileios Lakafosis of Cisco; Rushi Vyas, assistant professor at the University of Calgary; Riccardo Moro and Maurizio Bozzi, of the University of Pavia in Italy; and Apostolos Georgiadis and Ana Collado of the Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya in Spain. Kim, Cook, Lee, Lakafosis, and Vyas are all Ph.D. alumni of the ATHENA Lab.

A principal research engineer at the National Electric Energy Testing, Research, and Applications Center (NEETRAC), Hampton received this best paper award for his work entitled “C3.5: Estimating the Impact of VLF Frequency on Effectiveness of VLF Withstand Diagnostics.” His coauthors on the paper are fellow NEETRAC research engineer and Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. graduate Josh Perkel; Vivek Tomer and Marina Kuntsevich of the Dow Chemical Company (a NEETRAC member company); and Jean Carlos Hernandez, a Tech ECE Ph.D. graduate who is now the ECE department chair at the University of Merida in Venezuela and who works with NEETRAC in the summers as a visiting fellow. The prize also recognizes Hampton’s technical leadership, his sharing of knowledge in the field of polymeric cable insulation testing and diagnostics, and his demonstrated enthusiastic approach.

The paper helped to answer a question about the influence of voltage testing frequency on underground cable systems, which has been an important issue for the cable diagnostic testing community. Specifically, the paper addressed a longstanding problem with one of the most popular and effective Cable System Diagnostic methods – the Very Low Frequency (VLF) Withstand or Proof Test – that is deployed around the world. The VLF test uses different test frequencies to perform the Proof Test. However, the efficiency of the different frequencies has not been established. This paper reports laboratory test and evaluations of field tests that show the concerns over the test frequency cannot be verified. Thus, the efficacy of this very widely used test is better assured.

Established in 1984, the 9th International Conference on Insulated Power Cables (also known as Jicable) is the premier quadrennial international cable conference, and the Best Paper Prize has been awarded eight times since then. At the recent conference, there were 360 technical papers and 850 delegates from around the world.

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Nigel Hampton (2^nd from right) was presented with the Jicable’15 Prize. He is pictured with (L-R) Laurent Tardif, chair of the Jicable Overall Committee; Lucien Deschamp, Jicable organizer; and Marco Marelli, chair of the International Technical and Scientific Organising Committee.

Computing Reviews’ 19th Annual Best of Computing list consists of book and article nominations from reviewers, Computing Reviews’ category editors, editors-in-chief of journals, and computer scientists in both industry and academia. To view the list, visit http://www.computingreviews.com/recommend/bestof/notableitems.cfm?bestYear=2014.

Released in late December 2013, Cloud computing: a hands-on approach is written as a textbook on cloud computing for educational programs at colleges and universities, and also for cloud service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of cloud computing to accompany their own customer and developer training programs. The book covers the basic technologies that form the foundations of cloud computing, the programming aspects of cloud computing with a view toward rapid prototyping complex applications, and specialized aspects of cloud computing such as cloud application benchmarking, multimedia cloud applications, cloud security, and big data analytics. To date, 36 universities have adopted or are evaluating the book, and an Asian edition was recently released.

Presented with this award on July 2 at the American Control Conference in Chicago, Egerstedt was recognized “for outstanding contributions to control education through innovative and effective classroom teaching, textbook development, and graduate student mentoring.”

Egerstedt is the Schlumberger Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he also serves as the associate chair for research. He is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (GRITS Lab) and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Earlier this year, Egerstedt was honored by Georgia Tech with two awards–the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award, for excellence in mentoring his Ph.D. students, and the Outstanding Professional Education Award, for the reach and impact of his massive open online course, Control of Mobile Robots, on students around the world.

In 2013, Egerstedt received the W. Marshall Leach, Jr./Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Senior Teacher Award, an honor determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, and the Georgia Tech College of Engineering/Georgia Power Professor of Excellence Award, and the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology. He is also a past recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

“I always try to infuse my lectures with the sense of excitement I still feel about control theory and robotics,” Egerstedt said. “I am greatly honored to have received this award, as the educational side of the profession is very important to me.”

Oh will be presented with the Hutchins grant at the Surface Mount Technology Association (SMTA) International Conference, scheduled for September 27-October 1, 2015 in Rosemont, Illinois. Oh will also present a poster about his research at the conference, where he will receive the award on September 29.

The title of Oh's award-winning research is “A Three-Dimensional Packaging Platform with Integrated Microfluidic Cooling.” His research explores a three-dimensional (3D) packaging platform with an embedded microfluidic cooled heat sink. The objective of the research is to co-design both the electrical and the thermal aspects of the 3D packaging platform and experimentally validate the modeling efforts.

In particular, Oh has modeled, fabricated, and tested copper through-silicon-vias (TSVs) within a monolithic micropin-fin heat sink. The frequency-dependent RLCG parameters of TSVs were extracted up to 50 GHz through models and experiments, and the impact of microfluidic cooling was explored. His current work focuses on the implementation of broadband impedance controlled TSVs, as well as developing an RF platform for the Internet of Everything.

The Hutchins grant, co-sponsored by SMTA and Circuits Assembly magazine, was established in 1998 to encourage graduate students to pursue careers in the electronics industry by developing closer ties between student research and the needs of the electronics industry. The Hutchins grant award is a competitive program, which honors one full-time graduate-level student pursuing a degree and working on thesis research in electronics assembly, electronics packaging, or a related field.

The title of Hyun’s award winning presentation was “Optimal Obstacle Avoiding Trajectory Generation Using Root Locus Principles.” Hyun works on a project focused on biomimetic locomotion, and one of the problems that he addresses is how to search for an optimal path while clearing some obstacles.

Optimality can mean "minimum time," "maximal safety," or "minimal energy,” and it is of interest to determine such a path with minimal computational effort. One method to exploit is to adapt a well-known standard graphical technique from control theory (that was developed for entirely different purposes and is known as the Root Locus) and use it in this new problem setting. It brings together beautiful mathematics, physical insight, and sound engineering. Path planning is a central task in mobile robotics, with applications extending to search and rescue, monitoring, self-driving machinery or cars, or entertainment.

The two topics on which he will lecture are “Emerging Interconnection Architectures and Technologies” and “Heterogeneous System Design and Integration.”

Bakir has been a member of the ECE faculty since 2010. He directs the Integrated 3D Systems Group, where he and his team explore the design, fabrication, and characterization of 3D electronic systems and advanced interconnect networks. They focus on the (co)design, fabrication, and characterization of chip-level electrical, optical, and thermal interconnect networks to solve the power delivery, off-chip signaling, and cooling needs of future many-core and memory 3D integrated systems.

The IEEE CPMT Distinguished Lecturer Program aims to serve communities interested in the scientific, engineering, and production aspects of materials, component parts, modules, hybrids, and microelectronic systems for all electronic applications.

Lourenco is 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.

Lourenco’s fellowship proposal, “Modeling of Radiation Effects for Advanced Silicon-Based Electronic Systems within Extreme Environments,” will investigate the effects of semiconductor technology scaling on the radiation tolerance of silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistor (SiGe HBT) platforms. In addition, he will assist in the development of a calibrated, optical dosimetry system, providing new measurement and verification capabilities for material science and radiation effects research.

Co-sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, this research will be conducted in collaboration with Kazuyuki Hirose and Daisuke Kobayashi at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, a division of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Sagamihara, Japan.

Gimme’s hardware and accompanying analytics and tracking software helps prevent theft, saves labor costs, and improves inventory management. The company, co-founded by Georgia Tech electrical engineering senior Cory Hewett and 2014 Georgia Tech electrical engineering alumnus Evan Jarecki, bested three other startups in the final round of a bracket competition.

“We congratulate Gimme and all of the companies who participated in this year’s extremely strong competition,” stated TAG President and CEO Tino Mantella. “We look forward to the growth and continued success of these companies and we thank all of our sponsors and volunteers who have made the TAG Business Launch Competition possible.”

As a result of the win, Gimme will receive $50,000, a spot in Venture Atlanta (the premier technology conference in Georgia that connects Georgia’s entrepreneurs with the capital they need to grow their businesses), and more than $100,000 in donated services from the Atlanta business community to help them grow.

“Our team is ecstatic to be recognized by TAG and the Chamber of Commerce as this year’s winner,” said Hewett. “With the support of our customers and Georgia Tech, we are very optimistic to see what the future holds. A big part of our forward progress will involve bringing dynamic new talent into our team!”

Gimme is growing, and Hewett and Jarecki are adding more talent to the Gimme team, especially in the area of software development, and would love to hire current Georgia Tech students or alumni.  To learn more about Gimme and the startup culture at Georgia Tech, read “Workshop Maker Culture Meets Startup Incubators” in the latest issue of Georgia Tech Research Horizons Magazine.

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Top photo: Check presentation to Gimme co-founders at the TAG Business Launch Competition, held on May 11. Pictured left to right are Chris Hart, Southern Refreshment Services; David Hartnett, Metro Atlanta Chamber; Allyson Eman, Venture Atlanta; Tino Mantella, Technology Association of Georgia; Cory Hewett, founder of Gimme Vending LLC; Evan Jarecki, CTO/co-founder at Gimme Vending LLC; and Amanda Hendley, Technology Association of Georgia.

Middle photo: Chris Hart, owner of Southern Refreshment Services, presents award check to Gimme co-founders Cory Hewett (L) and Evan Jarecki (R). Southern Refreshment Services was Gimme’s first customer.

Bottom photo: Gimme co-founders Cory Hewett and Evan Jarecki are pictured with Lizzie Jarecki (center), Gimme's user experience designer.

About the TAG Business Launch Competition

Since it was founded in 2006, the TAG Business Launch Competition has become one of largest competitions of its kind in the United States, providing $550,000 in cash and over $1,900,000 in donated services to more than 200 young entrepreneurs.

Applicants are screened by an experienced panel of entrepreneurs and the most promising companies are assigned a mentor for the duration of the competition.  Representatives from out-of-state venture capital companies sit on the judge’s panel and a multitude of angel and venture capital investors attend the final event. 

About the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is one of eight schools and departments in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top 10 of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Over 2,800 students are enrolled in the School’s graduate and undergraduate programs, and in the last academic year, 792 degrees were awarded.

Over 100 ECE faculty members are involved in 11 areas of research, education, and commercialization – bioengineering, computer systems and software, digital signal processing, electric power, electromagnetics, electronic design and applications, microsystems, optics and photonics, systems and controls, telecommunications, and VLSI systems and digital design.

Howard was recognized for her work at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and at NASA and for co-founding Zyrobotics, a Georgia Tech startup that uses machine learning and robots to make educational toys for children, with a particular emphasis on helping kids with special needs.

To read the section of the article about Ayanna, visit http://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-women-engineers-in-2015-2015-5?#no-19-zyrobotics-ayanna-howard-5,  and to read the entire piece, visit http://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-women-engineers-in-2015-2015-5?#.

Another familiar Georgia Tech face in the rankings is Deb Kilpatrick, a Ph.D. ME graduate, who is the CEO of Evidation Health.

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

Lourenco received this award for his research contributions on radiation effects in silicon-based heterojunction integrated circuit platforms. His Ph.D. thesis research is focused on investigating the transient phenomena within silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies using advanced laser techniques, aiding this understanding by using 3-D modeling techniques, and leveraging this research for the development of radiation-hardened systems intended for orbital and space environments. A formal presentation of the award will take place at the 2015 IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference (IEEE NSREC), to be held July 13-17 in Boston, Massachusetts.

This research was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Naval Research Laboratory, CFD Research Corporation, and NASA.

Ildefonso is 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. 

Ildefonso is originally from Puerto Rico, where he completed his B.Sc. degree in computer engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) in 2014.  While at UPRM, he worked on a project aimed at modeling semiconductor devices for use in radiation-intense environments. This project led him to join Cressler’s group where he aims to study the propagation of transient radiation effects within radar systems intended for extreme environment applications. 

Chris Connelly

Carla East

Canek Fuentes Hernandez

Allen Robinson

Tammy Scott

Shyh-Chiang Shen

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to ECE and Georgia Tech!

Magnus Egerstedt – Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award

Magnus Egerstedt – Outstanding Professional Education Award

Raghupathy Sivakumar – Outstanding Achievement in Research Innovation Award

Doug Williams – Outstanding Service Award

Nine ECE students were among the top award winners at the annual Georgia Tech Student Honors Day, held on April 16 at the Georgia Tech Student Center Ballroom.

The following ECE-specific awards were recognized by College of Engineering Associate Dean Laurence Jacobs at this event. They and over 20 additional students were presented with their awards at the Roger P. Webb Awards Program held on April 22.

George Alexopoulos – Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award

Kenneth Marino – Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award

Adam Charles, Zhixuan Xia – ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Award

In addition, these ECE students were also recognized at Georgia Tech Student Honors Day.

Edward Zhu – Excellence in Global Economics and Modern Languages Award

This award is presented to the student who demonstrates outstanding scholarship in the School of Economics and the School of Modern Languages.

Richard Huckaby – Kelley Music Scholarship

This scholarship is awarded each semester through audition to students who demonstrate outstanding musicality, collaboration, and creativity in music performance and/or technical prowess.

David Ehrlich, Philippe Laban – Henry Ford II Scholar Awards

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

Donnya Ajdari – Helen Grenga Outstanding Woman Engineer Award

This award is presented to a female engineering student who has demonstrated outstanding scholarship, leadership, and service in her field and in the Georgia Tech community.

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

Ballistocardiography (BCG) – the measurement of cardiac function from small movements of the body that occur with the beating heart – has received increasing attention in recent years. To date, the technique has been used to study whole-body movements using many different platforms including beds, chairs, weighing scales, and force plates. More recently, with the advent of small, low-power microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers, BCG has been applied to local vibrations of the body with signals from wearable sensors. In particular, the ability to measure cardiac function with BCG from a wrist-mounted accelerometer is of high interest due to the introduction of smartwatches. However, despite several studies that have been conducted with wearable BCG, there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the physiology and mechanics that produce these wearable, localized signals. For example, body composition, the coupling between the wearable sensor and the skin, the orientation of the sensor, the location on the body where the sensor is placed, and the type of sensor are all presumed to affect the signal morphology.

To bridge this gap, we report a technique we developed to identify a linear time-invariant filter to transform a wearable BCG signal measuring local movements of the skin into a whole-body BCG measurement from a training, or calibration, step. A human subjects study was conducted to test this method with signals from an accelerometer placed on three locations on the body acquired simultaneously with BCG measured with a modified weighing scale. We found that the regularized system identification approach we present in this paper improved the quality of several widely-accepted BCG time and amplitude measurements during cross validation.

To read the entire article, visit the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cohen leads the Low Frequency Radio Group and has been a member of the faculty since October 2013.

Antennas are used for all kinds of communications, including cell phones, AM/FM radio, satellite broadcast and GPS, television, RFID, and much more. While it’s often useful to have small and portable antennas, certain frequencies of radio broadcasts require antennas that are extremely large. For instance, think of the size of AM radio towers and even cell phone towers, which are hundreds of feet high.

At lower radio frequencies, this becomes an extremely difficult problem, as the size of the radio wave being broadcast is very big. But Cohen and his team would like to be able to generate low frequency radio waves better, because unlike cell phone signals, they propagate around the world.

Cohen’s proposed program aims to overcome this problem by building an antenna out of a plasma. A common example of a plasma is what is inside your fluorescent light bulb. It results when you put a high voltage across a gas, which rips apart the molecules. When that happens, a plasma can conduct electricity, much the way metal does (most antennas are built out of metal). But, unlike metal, the plasma can be turned off quickly, simply by shutting off the voltage.

Using the ability to turn a plasma on and off very quickly, and doing it in just the right fashion, Cohen and his team can control the properties of the antenna quickly enough to boost the efficiency of a low frequency antenna, even when it is rather small.

Event hosts were Holmes Hawkins (BEE ’90), partner and head of the Intellectual Property Practice Group at King & Spalding, and Leslie Sibert, vice president for distribution at Georgia Power.

Individuals who received awards at campus ceremonies held earlier in the spring were also recognized at this program, as well as employees who received college degrees and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards.

Below are the recipients of the 2015 Roger P. Webb Awards. Congratulations to everyone on another fantastic year!

ECE Student Awards

Outstanding ECE Sophomore Award

Alexander Popescu

ECE Junior Scholar Award

Hanbin Ying

ECE Undergraduate Research Award

Jonathan Tuck

Most Outstanding ECE Senior Co-Op Award

Luke Booth

Outstanding Service to Georgia’s Community Award

Partha Sarathi Chakraborty

ECE Faculty Award

Stephanie Gillespie

Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award

George Alexopoulos

Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award

Kenneth Marino

ECE Senior Scholar Awards

Aidan Dowdle, Andrew Duda, Jordan Ford, Yunyi Gong, Andrew Harris, Suyoung Jang, Alejandro Jimenez, Nedeljko Karaulac, Pavel Komarov, James Nagendran, Brian Nemsick, Troy O’Neal, Charles Austin Sutlief

Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Awards

Jonathan Sculley, Yijun Bao

ECE Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence Award

Nathan Parrish

ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Awards

Adam Charles, Zhixuan Xia

ECE Staff Awards

Hats Off Performance Awards

Peggy Hand, Ruth Pierre

Research Spotlight Award

Young Woo Ok

Academic Spotlight Award

Kevin Johnson

ECE Faculty Awards

Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award

Hua Wang

ECE Outreach Award

Madhavan Swaminathan

Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award

Mark Davenport

W. Marshall Leach, Jr./Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award

Aaron Lanterman

D. Scott Wills ECE Distinguished Mentor Award

Paul Steffes

Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award

Geoffrey Ye Li

The title of Ceyhan’s paper is “Impact of Size Effects in Local Interconnects for Future Technology Nodes: A Study Based on Full-Chip Layouts." His coauthors on the paper are his former Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Azad Naeemi, ECE Professor Sung Kyu Lim, and Shreepad Panth and Moongon Jung, both ECE Ph.D. students of Dr. Lim’s. Ceyhan graduated with his Ph.D. last December and now works at Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Historically, the resistance-capacitance (RC) delay of electronic chips was dominated by the front-end-of-the-line (FEOL) parameters, such as the resistance of the driver transistor and the receiver load capacitance. With miniaturization of the device and interconnect dimensions for over four decades, the backend-of-the-line (BEOL) RC delay became a critical factor in determining the performances of modern electronic chips.

The resistivity of copper wires increases rapidly at small dimensions due to increasing electron scattering at the grain boundaries and surfaces. This adverse impact of scaling on the resistance, hence delay of wires, prevents fully exploiting the improvement in the intrinsic device performance.

In this paper, the team built multiple predictive standard cell and interconnect libraries down to the 7-nm technology node to enable early investigation of the electronic chip performance using commercial electronic design automation tools. Using these libraries, they built layouts for multiple benchmark circuits to study the sensitivity of the circuit performance and power dissipation to multiple interconnect technology parameters at ultra-scaled technology nodes.

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

Ildefonso’s fellowship proposal, “System-Level Characterization of Single Event Transients in RF Systems,” aims to study the propagation of transient radiation effects within radar systems intended for extreme environment applications. Results from this study will allow engineers to identify and correct possible weaknesses in a system that would not be observed by studying individual circuit blocks.

Among the honored team members was Jon Jenkins (BSEE ’87, MSEE ’88, PhD EE ’92), the leader of the Kepler Mission’s data analysis group. During his years at Georgia Tech, Jenkins was advised by Paul Steffes, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After Jenkins graduated with his doctorate, he joined NASA Ames Research Center to work for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Jenkins then joined the Kepler Mission Team in 1995.

Since its launch in March 2009, the Kepler Mission has detected more than 4,000 candidate planets in orbit around other stars, or exoplanets for short. More than 1,000 of those exoplanet candidates have since been confirmed. These discoveries have revolutionized humanity’s view of Earth’s place in the universe by unveiling a whole new side of our Milky Way galaxy – one that is teeming with planets.

As a result of Kepler’s discoveries, scientists are confident that most stars have planets and that Earth’s galaxy may host tens of billions of Earth-sized planets that reside in a distant star's “habitable zone,” the region around a star where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. The Kepler Mission is also establishing a foundation for future studies of exoplanet atmospheres that could eventually answer the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.

The Kepler space telescope infers the existence of an exoplanet, by measuring the amount of starlight blocked when it passes or transits in front of its parent star. From these data, a planet's size in radius, orbital period in Earth years, and the amount of heat energy received from the host star can be determined.

During its prime mission, Kepler simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars for four years, looking for the telltale dimming that would indicate the presence of an orbiting planet. In May 2014, Kepler began a new mission, K2, to observe a series of fields along the ecliptic plane, the orbital path of the Earth about the sun, where the familiar constellations of the zodiac lie. This new mission provides scientists with an opportunity to search for even more exoplanets, as well as new opportunities to observe notable star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies, and supernovae. The spacecraft continues to collect data in its new mission.

Additional information about the group photo: Gen. John "Jack" R. Dailey, director of the National Air and Space Museum, presents the 2015 Current Achievement Trophy Award to NASA's Kepler Mission Team. Jon Jenkins (BSEE 1987, MSEE 1988, Ph.D. EE 1992) is the sixth person from the left in the photo.

Benjamin Chang
Chris Timperio
Erin Hanson
Zack Danielak

Benjamin Chang

Electrical engineering major Benjamin Chang is all about upholding Georgia Tech traditions and spreading school spirit to new Yellow Jackets. His college career has been punctuated by his involvement in several extracurricular organizations that spread the Georgia Tech love to new and current students alike. Chang started working with FASET (Familiarization and Adaptation to the Surroundings and Environs of Tech), which is an orientation program for new students and their families, during the summer after his sophomore year. From there, he steadily became involved in more activities such as Wreck Camp, an extended orientation experience for new students designed to help jumpstart the college experience, and GT 1000, The Georgia Tech first year seminar. 

When he isn’t helping new students get acclimated to the Tech experience, he is busy spreading school cheer to the student body, alumni, and the greater Georgia Tech family through the Ramblin’ Reck Club, an organization of students founded in 1930 that is committed to the education and promotion of Tech spirit, history, and tradition. In addition to organizing spirit-related events and upholding Tech traditions like Homecoming and T-Book, the Reck Club performs one of the most important functions on campus: maintaining the Ramblin’ Wreck.

This year, Chang added Georgia Tech Cheerleading to his portfolio of spirit-related commitments. In between his extracurricular activities, he managed to squeeze in co-op work with NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The challenge of participating in so many activities combined with coursework taught Chang valuable time management skills as well as how to be a team player. Through it all, his Reck Club family helped him inject moments of fun into times that would have otherwise been stressful.

Chang is still deciding between graduate school or working in industry, but regardless of his future path, he’s sure to keep his beloved alma mater close to his heart for the long haul. 

“I love this school and I want to help others develop the same love for this school that I have. We’re only at Tech for so long, I want people’s experience here to be positive and memorable when they look back as alumni,” Chang said.

Chris Timperio

Electrical engineering major Chris Timperio spent much of his time in college building a global community through the game of lacrosse. Now his legacy stretches from Georgia to Europe and includes an opportunity to play in the Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) World Lacrosse Championships.  

Attracted by the fast pace and high level of concentration required, Timperio’s passion for the sport started in high school. When he moved from New York to Savannah, Georgia to attend Armstrong Atlantic State University (AASU), he noticed that lacrosse wasn’t as popular in the South. He was disappointed to find that AASU didn’t have a team, but felt he lacked the influence and know-how to change things. 

“I was thinking there wasn’t any possible way this kid from New York could just come down and start a team,” Timperio said.

He quickly put his urge to start one on the backburner in order to acclimate to his new environment and focus on schoolwork. Once Timperio settled in, he joined a local club called Savannah Schlitz where he gained new skills and enjoyed the camaraderie of working with a team toward a common goal. With that experience under his belt, he felt confident enough to take the plunge and see what it would take to start a team at AASU. He paired up with another northeastern transplant named Gregory Muller and they jumped into the process.

“We studied the ins and outs of creating a sport club team, recruited players, talked to administrators, scheduled fundraisers, wrote a constitution, and petitioned for the new AASU lacrosse team to become a registered sports organization. From the time we started the process to the time I left Armstrong to transfer to Tech, the team had grown to more than 20 players with funding from the school for uniforms, equipment, and travel,” Timperio said. 

Moving from AASU to Georgia Tech, Timperio went from a big fish in a small sea to being swallowed up by rigorous courses and a well-established lacrosse program.

“I knew the workload at Tech would be tougher than AASU and the lacrosse program would now be in the big leagues. It was definitely humbling going from the top of your program to starting out at the bottom. However, this gave me a new motivation to work even harder and make a name for myself at Tech,” Timperio said. 

During his junior year at Tech, Timperio spent a semester abroad in Metz, France at the Georgia Tech Lorraine campus. While there, he had the opportunity to meet and train with lacrosse teams from all over Europe including groups in Rome and Belgrade, as well as German teams from Kaiserslautern, Saarbrucken, Trier, and Munich. Over a weekend trip to Serbia, Timperio met and played with the Belgrade Zombies. He became fast friends with the group as they played lacrosse and toured the city. At the end of the weekend, the Zombies invited Timperio to play with them for their induction into the FIL World Lacrosse Championships. 

After graduation, Timperio plans to work in RF engineering at Space X. But regardless of his professional commitments, the friendships and community he has built with lacrosse will endure. He has a firm date on the calendar to reunite with the Zombies in Manchester, England for the 2018 Championships. He also hopes to pass his love of the game on to the next generation by coaching a youth team.

Erin Hanson

Erin Hanson has a tattoo of Karel J. Robot, the first program she learned from her high school mentor, computer science teacher Bambi Hertel. It is a permanent testament to Hertel’s passion for programming and teaching as well as a reminder to keep moving forward, no matter the obstacles. The tattoo and her teacher’s impact on her were made all the more poignant due to Hertel’s passing from lung cancer last year, combined with her own health struggles.  

Hanson took every course offered by Hertel in order to soak up everything she had to teach. By the time Hanson enrolled at Georgia Tech, it was a no-brainer that she would major in computer engineering. She has excelled in her studies due in part to the foundation laid by Hertel. 

“Academically, I feel mediocre compared to a lot of the kids I encounter in ECE. The accomplishments that stick out the most to me are very small moments in the grand scheme of the six years I've spent here: that one time I got 100% on my thermo test, or the one semester that I managed to pull off straight A's,” Hanson said. 

Despite her humility, Hanson’s accomplishments earned her the prestigious Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from the Department of Defense (DoD). The award targets scientists and engineers with an aptitude for conducting theoretical and applied research. It covers the full cost of tuition, plus a monthly living stipend. In exchange, an equal time commitment in the form of civilian work is owed to the DoD.  

“That award lifted a tremendous financial burden. It was better than any grade I could have gotten,” Hanson said. 

During the spring of 2014 while enjoying academic successes and a new found financial safety net, Hanson began experiencing sharp pain in her lower abdomen. An ultrasound revealed a grapefruit-sized mass on her ovary. Surgery to remove the mass was done right before spring break. The pathology report came back and she was diagnosed with stage two ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy was recommended immediately.  

“All I could think was ‘Oh my God…I’m never going to graduate.’ I tried to bargain with the oncologist. ‘I can’t do chemo now. I have an internship in Ohio and then only 12 credits left. We can do chemo after I graduate. He was not amused,” Hanson said. 

Surgery and chemotherapy meant Hanson missed a good bit of school. Physical recovery was hard, but the mental strain has taken even more of a toll.

“They don’t really tell you how much it can mess with your brain,” Hanson said. 

She recalled a final she had to take during the course of treatment and described it as “nauseously grasping at straws that aren’t really there.” Even now she says her brain isn’t at 100%, but the compassion of her classmates and professors has made her battle easier and taught her to be vulnerable.

“I desperately wanted to remain this self-sufficient, independent person, but it wasn’t always possible. There’s a lot to be said for asking for help and admitting your shortcomings,” Hanson said. 

Hanson is now in remission and will head to Dayton, Ohio after graduation to fulfill her civilian career duties under the SMART program with Wright Patterson Air Force Base. From there, graduate school may be in the cards.

“After all,” Hanson said with her customary dry wit, “I now have a killer adversity essay for my applications.”

Zack Danielak

Zack Danielak remembers being captivated by the dissection of a boom box in 3rd grade. At such a young age, Danielak had no real understanding of technology, but the puzzle it presented was intriguing. The fact that he comes from a long line of engineers combined with this “light bulb” moment in third grade led him to study electrical engineering. As he began to uncover the mysteries of technology in class, he also started performing his own kind of magic as a member of the Georgia Tech Cheerleaders. And while his love of engineering played out like destiny, his other great passion happened almost as a fluke. 

Danielak, who was interested in weightlifting during his freshman and sophomore years, ran into a friend at the gym who happened to be on the cheerleading squad.  

“He told me that if I like lifting weights, I should try lifting people! So I went to an open practice and loved it right away,” Danielak said. 

As a member of the White Squad, Danielak cheers at home football games and women’s basketball games as well as competing against other universities at Cheersport Nationals. His favorite moment cheering was when he did his first back flip at Bobby Dodd Stadium.

One of 12 men on a 38-person squad, Danielak is the only ECE student and spends a lot of time with his female teammates both during practice and at games. Not only is the sport challenging and fun, it is also a refreshing contrast to his classes, where the ratio of men to women is decidedly higher.

“Being part of a team with so many successful, athletic, and intelligent female engineers is motivating and inspiring. Our team has one of the highest percentages of athletes in STEM fields and on the Dean’s List, due in no small part to the drive and ambition that these women bring to the team,” Danielak said.

In addition to being inspired by his fellow engineering teammates, he also acknowledges other benefits of the sport.  

“I now have the confidence to shine through interviews, as well as lots of experience working under pressure, making quick decisions, and working with a team through thick and thin,” Danielak said.

After graduation, he hopes to work in the automotive industry and focus on hybridization and electrification. With the confidence that comes from performing in front of crowds of fans in Bobby Dodd Stadium combined with a world-class education in electrical engineering, look for him making waves with eco-friendly cars in the future. And while his life may take him far from Tech, he hopes to come back and attend as many football games as possible to cheer on the Yellow Jackets from the stands instead of the sidelines.

Georgia Tech’s “Remote Repositioning” project is one of 25 experiments launched by Ford Motor Company as part of their “Smart Mobility” initiative. The project, which allows an operator to remotely drive real vehicles using available technology, was highlighted by Ford CEO Mark Fields in his keynote address as one of the innovations that will help the company solve current and future transportation challenges.

Using cameras and sensors to stream live video over a 4g/LTE cellular network, a person sitting in a remote location can operate a vehicle without physically being inside it.

"You can think of this setup as an anonymous vehicle with a human being in the middle. This system presents many challenges,” said AlRegib. “For example, it demands the video streams to be delivered with no latency, which is not possible when we use cellular networks. Thus, the system has to provide the remote driver with some guidelines even if the video streams are not being delivered within the required time window. Furthermore, the vehicle needs to be equipped with sensors and self-control systems for emergency situations.”

Low-speed golf carts owned by Georgia Tech are being tested as a proof of concept by AlRegib, Bras, and a team of ECE and ME students. Long-term applications for this technology could include offsite processing for car rental agencies, remote valet services, and even mobility solutions for the elderly and disabled.

“Our project is very exciting given its multidisciplinary nature with students from both ME and ECE working together. This remote driving concept is another element in the future of transportation in the 21st century,” said AlRegib.

To learn more about the project and see the technology in action, visit Ford’s Mobility Experiment: Remote Repositioning  webpage.

An associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Barnes has 20 years of experience teaching synthetic aperture radar (SAR) at the professional education and graduate student level. He is also a member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing and holds adjunct status with the Georgia Tech Research Institute as a principal research engineer.

This new book covers all major topics related to SAR science, systems, and software. SAR science is established on a foundation of wave theory. SAR systems for stripmap, spotlight, spotmap, volumetric, inverse, scan, swept, etc. modes are explained in this text, and SAR analysis techniques are also presented at a detailed mathematical level.

All SAR algorithm classes are presented: Stolt formatting, polar formatting (including direct and filtered back-projection methods), hyperbolic coherent summing, spherical coherent summing (including direct, filtered and factorized back-propagation versions), range stacking, range-Doppler, and chirp scaling.

More information can be found at sarwave.com, and the book is available for purchase at Amazon.com.

Related lecture files and Matlab scripts will be periodically posted to sarwave.com. To monitor or engage in related #SARWAVE conversations, then please explore the following social media channels:

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Yang and Zhang are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). They are advised by Bakir, who is the ON Semiconductor Junior Professor in ECE and director of the Integrated 3D Systems (I3DS) Group.

The title of the team’s award-winning paper is “Self-Aligned Silicon Interposers, Tiles, and Silicon Bridges Using Positive Self-Alignment Structures and Rematable Mechanically Flexible Interconnects.” Silicon interposer-based interconnection has attracted significant research attention recently due to the growing need for larger bandwidth density and lower energy-per-bit off-chip communication. The key feature of silicon interposer-based systems is the use of legacy CMOS processes to form a dense array of fine-pitch electrical wires (and silicon photonics in some cases) on a silicon substrate to interconnect heterogeneous integrated circuits; in essence, future "advanced packaging" will highly leverage silicon CMOS based processes.

However, the interposer-based interconnection is only a partial solution to the rapidly growing chip-to-chip bandwidth requirement, because an interposer size is limited by both technical and economical constraints, and in turn, it ultimately limits the size and the number of chips that can be assembled on top. Eventually, multiple interposers may become necessary, and high-bandwidth interconnections between interposers will become vital in providing a high-performance large-scale system.

To this end, a large-scale contiguous all-silicon system platform has been proposed and demonstrated. In this paper, three silicon interposer tiles are aligned and mounted on a printed wiring board (PWB), and two silicon bridges are aligned and mounted on top of the three interposer tiles; each silicon bridge spans two interposer tiles. Four positive self-alignment structures and four inverted pyramid pits self-align a tile to the PWB and a bridge to two tiles. Mechanically flexible interconnects (MFI) form nonbonding electrical connections between the three interposer tiles and two silicon bridges. Pointy tips on the MFIs form low contact resistance with the pads on the silicon bridges. A small alignment error is demonstrated between the interposer tiles, which is critical for silicon photonic interconnection.

“Great engineers imagine new things – and build them,” said Draper Laboratory President and CEO Kaigham J. Gabriel. “These LED pioneers created technologies that brought new light to our lives, spawning an industry that today boasts hundreds of thousands of jobs while making energy consumption more efficient.”

Isamu Akasaki; George Craford; Russell Dupuis; Nick Holonyak, Jr.; and Shuji Nakamura each made contributions critical to taking light-emitting diodes from laboratory concept to ubiquitous reality in smartphone screens, surgical lighting, agriculture and many other applications.

Holonyak created the first red LED in 1962. Craford invented the first yellow LED in 1972. He also developed processes for the first large-scale commercial production of red LEDs, and decades later contributed to the development of high-efficiency white LEDs.

Georgia Tech’s Dupuis invented the process that is the basis of virtually all production of high-brightness LEDs, laser diodes, solar cells, and high-speed optoelectronic (light controlling) devices, in 1977.

Akasaki created the first blue LED in 1989, which enabled bright energy-saving white light sources by using Dupuis’ technology. Nakamura demonstrated the first high-brightness blue LED in 1994, which led to the development of Blu-ray™ technology.

Long-lasting white light used in LED display screens comes from mixing red, yellow and blue LEDs. According to industry analysts, LED lighting created a $17.7 billion global industry, while benefiting the environment with its high efficiency.

Dupuis was appointed Steve W. Chaddick Chair in Electro-Optics at Georgia Tech in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2003.  He is currently studying the growth of III-V compound semiconductor devices by MOCVD, including materials in the InAlGaN/GaN, InAlGaAsP/GaAs, InAlGaAsSb, and InAlGaAsP/InP systems. A Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Dupuis and two of his colleagues were awarded the 2002 National Medal of Technology for their work on developing and commercializing LEDs.He won the 1985 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Optical Society of America. Dupuis won the 2004 John Bardeen Award and the 2007 IEEE Edison Medal.

The Charles Stark Draper Prize was established and endowed by Draper Laboratory in 1988 in tribute to its founder, Dr. Charles Stark Draper, who pioneered inertial navigation. It honors those who have contributed to the advancement of engineering and public understanding of the importance of engineering and technology. Previous winners over the past 25 years include the inventors of the mobile phone and supporting infrastructure, the World Wide Web, GPS, and the turbojet engine. The Draper Prize for Engineering, which annually recognizes engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society, is considered the Nobel Prize of engineering.

They are being honored for their June 2014 article, “Harvesting Wireless Power,” which presents design rules and performance analysis for building state-of-the-art RF energy-harvesting devices. They will be presented with a plaque during the awards banquet at the 2015 IEEE International Microwave Symposium in Phoenix, Arizona this May. The award also comes with all-expense paid trips for the authors to attend the symposium in Phoenix, as well as a $2,000 cash prize.

Valenta is a fall 2014 Ph.D. graduate of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and was advised by Durgin, an ECE associate professor and leader of the Georgia Tech Propagation Laboratory. Valenta now works as a research engineer in the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Recipients of these awards will be honored at the annual Roger P. Webb Awards Program, which will take place April 22 from 3-5 p.m. in the Klaus Building Atrium. To nominate an individual for an award, please visit the 2015 Roger P. Webb Awards Program website for specific instructions on how to submit nomination packages. 

For more information about this event, contact Andrew Peterson at 404.894.4697, peterson@ece.gatech.edu for general inquiries. For specific award categories, contact:

Student awards: Greg Durgin, 404.894.2951, durgin@ece.gatech.edu

Staff awards: Linda Dillon, 404.894.7574, linda.dillon@ece.gatech.edu

Faculty awards: Jackie Nemeth, 404.894.2906, jackie.nemeth@ece.gatech.edu

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

Lourenco received this award for his research contributions on radiation effects in silicon-based heterojunction integrated circuit platforms. His Ph.D. thesis research is focused on investigating the transient phenomena within silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies using advanced laser techniques, aiding this understanding by using 3-D modeling techniques, and leveraging this research for the development of radiation-hardened systems intended for orbital and space environments.

This research is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Naval Research Laboratory, CFD Research Corporation, and NASA.

Beirami’s thesis was entitled “Network Compression via Network Memory: Fundamental Performance Limits." Data compression is of great practical importance as it can reduce the volume of daily data communication and storage. His thesis quantifies the degree of data compression in finite-length data, such as network packets. It also proposes algorithms that take advantage of network nodes equipped with memory to approach the Shannon compression limit of arbitrarily long sequences. Advised by Faramarz Fekri, Beirami graduated in May 2014 and is now a postdoctoral associate and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of ECE at Duke University.

Xia’s thesis was entitled “Highly Sensitive, Multiplexed Integrated Photonic Structures for Lab-on-a-Chip Sensing.” The focus of Xia’s doctoral research and his thesis was to develop essential building blocks for compact, low-cost, and high performance optical sensing systems for environmental and health care applications. Advised by Ali Adibi, Xia defended his thesis in December 2014 and will graduate in May 2015. He is now a senior research and development engineer at Atlanta-based Sinoora, Inc., a spin-off company of Georgia Tech and Adibi's Photonics Research Group.

Each year, about a dozen graduate students from universities around the world are selected for this honor and recognized for their outstanding research in microwave theory and microwave engineering. Hu will be presented with this award at the 2015 IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS), which will be held May 16-22 in Phoenix, Arizona. All of the awardees and their Ph.D. research will be featured in a future issue of IEEE Microwave Magazine.



Hu's award is based on his proposed Ph.D. research entitled "Digital Intensive Hybrid Architectures for Efficiency and Linearity Improvement in Silicon-Based RF Power Amplifiers." In this work, he explores advanced radio-frequency (RF) wireless transmitters with digital intensive architectures in highly scaled integrated circuit (IC) processes.

Leveraging the in-situ digital computation capabilities in scaled IC processes, these transmitter architectures can potentially achieve substantially enhanced large-signal RF transmitter performance, including linearity, bandwidth, robustness, and energy-efficiency, to meet increasingly stringent requirements in modern wireless systems. Compared with conventional RF transmitters, these digital intensive architectures are particularly conducive to full system-on-chip (SoC) integrations for next-generation, energy-efficient mobile devices or field-deployable wireless networks for both commercial and military applications.

Hu adds the IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship to a list of outstanding achievements that include the 2014 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Symposium Best Student Paper Award Winner (1st Place), the 2014 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Best Student Paper Award Finalist Co-Recipient, and the 2014 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award.

Each year, the Outstanding Chapter Award is given to only one chapter chosen from among all 85 IEEE SSCS chapters in the world. Hua Wang, who has served as the chair of the Atlanta chapter since 2012, will be presented with this award at the plenary session of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference on February 23.

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and is a member of the Georgia Electronic Design Center.

To learn more about the Atlanta chapter of IEEE SSCS/CAS, please visit http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/gems/IEEE.html or contact Wang at 404.385.6003 or at hua.wang@ece.gatech.edu.

The Class of 1940 distinction is one of several awards made annually by the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) to instructors of small and large classes. It is based on the Course Instructor Opinion Surveys that were administered in the fall 2013 and spring 2014 semesters. A high response rate (85 percent of greater) and a near-perfect evaluation score are required for consideration.

Bakir, Cressler, Michaels, and their colleagues within the College of Engineering and throughout Georgia Tech will be formally recognized next month when CETL holds its annual Celebrating Teaching Day.

A professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tentzeris coauthored this paper with Arnaud Veda of the University of Montpellier 2 in France and Lauri Sydanheimo and Leena Ukkonen of Tampere University of Technology in Finland.

Their paper, entitled "A Fully Inkjet-Printed Wireless and Chipless Sensor for CO₂ and Temperature Detection," presents a detailed study on the first fully inkjet-printed chipless wireless sensors on flexible substrates that can simultaneously sense carbon dioxide and temperature. The presented topology takes advantage of an inkjet-printed polymer/single walled carbon nanotube (CNT) composite ink and features a drastically lower cost than all existing solutions and can be printed on virtually every flexible substrate such as paper, plastic, or fabrics.

The findings from this paper could be applied in numerous areas ranging from wearable/implantable electronics and biomonitoring to smart skin, smart storage of perishable materials, the internet of things, and smart climate control and monitoring systems.  

The VIP Program unites large teams of undergraduates with graduate students and faculty to work together on long-term research projects. Under the leadership of Georgia Tech and the co-leadership of the University of Michigan, the Helmsley award will expand VIP to a consortium of other schools. That will give the program foothold in a variety of institutions across the U.S., including those that primarily serve underrepresented, minority, or nontraditional students, as well as members of the prestigious Association of American Universities. 

Tech will be able to expand its own VIP program, whose research teams currently include undergraduates from more than 20 majors. Each team focuses on one topic – such as human rhythmic ability, the Internet’s impact on democratic processes, and technology’s uses at sports stadiums – and encourages collaboration across disciplines.  

Organizers plan to more than double the number of VIP teams and hire more staff members to help the program grow.   

"The Helmsley Charitable Trust is thrilled to support the VIP Consortium’s transformative approach to active learning in engineering," said Ryan Kelsey, program officer at the Trust. "It is very compelling to see such a range of engineering schools across the country that are ready to adopt large-scale, effective practices that we expect will retain more students, particularly more women and students of color."

The Helmsley Charitable Trust’s education program aims to increase American competitiveness and innovation. At the post-secondary level, it focuses on increasing the number and diversity of college graduates in STEM fields by improving persistence to graduate.

VIP offers an ideal setting for rethinking STEM education, because it draws students of various ages, interests and experiences together for ongoing work. VIP projects can last a decade or more, and undergraduates may spend up to three years with their project teams. 

"For many students, this is the first chance they’ve had to do something real while they’re undergraduates," said Edward Coyle, Arbutus Chair for the Integration of Research and Education at Tech. He is the VIP Program’s founder and director, as well as an Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Research Alliance. 

Thanks to VIP, some students may feel more comfortable sticking with STEM fields and pursuing them after college. The program, organizers wrote in their Helmsley grant proposal, “can create the sense of belonging and pride of accomplishment that motivates students to persist through other elements of the STEM curriculum.” 

After establishing VIP at Purdue University in 2001, Coyle came to Georgia Tech and launched its VIP program through the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. By the fall of 2014, more than 300 Tech students – the majority from the College of Engineering – were participating in VIP teams each semester. 

The VIP consortium consists of 15 public and private institutions, including two universities abroad: National Ilan University in Taiwan and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. The 13 participating U.S. universities are:

• Georgia Tech
• University of Michigan
• Purdue University
• Texas A&M
• Rice University
• University of Washington
• Howard University
• Morehouse College
• Florida International University
• Boise State University
• Colorado State University
• University of Hawaii-Manoa
• Virginia Commonwealth University

"Given the number of former VIP students that have let me know that VIP has been a deciding factor in finding a career job position," said Randal Abler, VIP’s associate director, "I'm excited to see what can be accomplished by extending the program beyond Georgia Tech."