Madhavan Swaminathan won a Best Paper Award at the 10th IEEE Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference (NMDC 2015), held September 13-16 in Anchorage, Alaska.

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.