Some labs in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) use liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to chill cryogenic test systems to as low as 4 Kelvins (K), or -452.47 degrees Fahrenheit (F), temperatures that rival the coldest regions of deep space.

At this point, materials and electronic devices stop behaving in familiar ways, which is exactly why ECE researchers use these extreme conditions to explore and develop new semiconductor technologies.

“Electronics are very temperature dependent,” Professor John Cressler said, whose lab houses some of these cryogenic test systems. “Whether you see it or not, every electronic you buy has a tested temperature spec associated with it.”

Current commercially sold devices, including most cell phones, are made to run between 32 F and 85 F. Researchers in ECE test across a far wider range, as they develop technology with extraterrestrial and quantum computing applications in mind.

Other ECE teams work in natural extremes, carrying instruments into polar regions where cold creates challenges that no lab can fully replicate.

Just as cold pushes athletes in different ways, it guides ECE research down its own distinct paths.

Read the full story on the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering's website.

The prestigious three-year award is given to South Korea’s top graduate students in the field of medical bioscience.

Yun’s research interests lie at the intersection of biophotonics, nanophotonics, and image processing. Her work involves optical experiments, image processing, nanofabrication, and optimization at both the imaging system and device structure levels, all toward the development of advanced imaging technologies for biomedical applications.

Currently, she’s working  to enhance spatio-temporal resolution of optical microscopy by integrating high-speed camera systems, such as SPAD arrays, with advanced image processing algorithms to achieve high-SNR imaging with ultra-high spatial and temporal resolution for biomedical applications.

She’s also working on the development of photonic devices for advanced imaging. The goal is to design and optimize nanophotonic structures for applications like single-shot hyperspectral imaging to enhance optical functionalities.

Yun received her B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea. During her master’s degree, she published multiple papers on the design strategies of metasurfaces and other nanophotonic structures for applications including wide field-of-view depth imaging and radiative cooling.

As she pursues her Ph.D. in ECE, she aims to apply her background in light-matter interactions and design optimization to develop advanced bio-imaging systems that exploit higher degrees of freedom of light—such as polarization, phase, and spectral properties—and leverage complex photonic behaviors to push the frontiers of biomedical imaging.

The Asan Foundation is a South Korean social welfare foundation that supports the betterment of human society through research funding and a number of other activities.

The project, led by the Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE) at The University of Texas at Austin, represents a total investment of $1.4 billion. The $840 million award from DARPA, announced by TIE in 2024, aims to develop the next generation of high-performing semiconductor microsystems for the Department of Defense (DoD). 

“We are honored to collaborate with TIE and its broader team on this far reaching and strategic program to enable best in class 3D heterogeneous integration (3DHI) processes and technologies in the United States,” said Muhannad S. Bakir, the Dan Fielder Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center, who is heading the project for Georgia Tech. 

3DHI is a semiconductor manufacturing process that incorporates different materials and components into microsystems with precision assembly. The use of 3DHI allows for the creation of high-performance, compact, and energy-efficient systems. 

The investment is part of DARPA’s Next Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) Program comprised of 32 defense electronics and leading commercial semiconductor companies and 18 nationally recognized academic institutions.

Under the agreement, TIE will establish a national open access R&D and prototyping fabrication facility. The facility will enable the DoD to create higher performance, lower power, lightweight, and compact defense systems. The advancements are expected to have wide-ranging applications, including radar, satellite imaging, and unmanned aerial vehicles.  

Georgia Tech will provide a wide range of expertise in 3DHI including design, fabrication and assembly processes, and characterization to support the NGMM national open-access R&D and prototyping facility at TIE.  

Regents' Professor and Morris M. Bryan, Jr. Professor Suresh K. Sitaraman in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering will be a key contributor to Georgia Tech’s efforts on the project.

“We are delighted to be partnering with UT/TIE on the establishment of a 3D Heterogeneous Integration Microsystem prototyping  facility,” said Sitaraman. “In addition to advancing fundamental science, this project is a great opportunity for Georgia Tech to demonstrate and integrate our ground-breaking and innovative 3DHI research approaches and technology solutions into TIE’s prototyping facility, and understand the challenges involved when translating lab-scale research work to a large industry-strength fabrication facility.” 

ECE Professors Saibal Mukhopadhyay, Arijit Raychowdhury, Visvesh Sathe, and Shimeng Yu will be working alongside Bakir and Sitaraman. 

A significant portion of the research will be conducted at the Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS), which operates Georgia Tech’s state-of-the-art electronics and nanotechnology core facilities. 

Read the press release from TIE and view the project’s team and partners.  

Installed recently at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC), an X-band weather radar purchased two years ago by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia (UGA) is now providing data for a section of north Georgia where information on severe storms such as tornados can be limited by terrain.

The radar will also be used for research into weather and severe storms, and by students at the three institutions for learning about everything from physics and engineering to weather, rainfall, and the effects of changing climate on the migration patterns of birds and insects. The instrument will be one of just a handful of weather radars operated by universities in the United States.

“We are really excited about this partnership with Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the University of Georgia, and Georgia Gwinnett College,” said Marshall Shepherd, Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Partnership at UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and Director of UGA’s Atmospheric Sciences Program. “The radar will be a real-time component of classes, so it’s creating new instructional and service capabilities. It will also enable researchers at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech to pursue new research opportunities in the areas of severe weather, frozen precipitation – and perhaps even studies of birds and insects.”

The radar will provide a new data source for UGA’s WeatherDawgs service, which provides hyperlocal weather data not only for the Athens community, but also for residents of eastern and northeastern Georgia. The system will also provide a real-time component for the mesoscale meteorology course taught at the university.

For Georgia Tech, the radar will support the work of the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC), a state-funded initiative that serves as a focal point for severe storms research in the state. The radar will also support research and education at Georgia Tech, including courses on weather radar systems and studies of lightning being done in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“The new radar will help fill some low-level gaps in weather radar coverage in north Georgia, and give higher-resolution data for the Georgia Gwinnett campus, University of Georgia campus, Georgia Tech campus and areas in between,” said John Trostel, director of the SSRC. “This is an area where both UGA and Georgia Tech have interests because it goes from urban to suburban, then back to urban. We might see some very interesting weather phenomena going on in those transition areas.”

The National Weather Service has access to a feed from the radar and will use it to obtain information about low-altitude weather activity that can’t be seen as well from sources such as the NEXRAD radar based in Peachtree City and the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Trostel added.

For Georgia Gwinnett College, the radar will provide real-world examples of how physics and engineering concepts are applied. Data from the radar system, which will be accessible to the college, would also provide students with a new research opportunity that is a required component of the science curriculum.

“Our Physics and Pre-Engineering courses already cover the concepts of electromagnetic waves and the Doppler effect, which are the main principles behind radar,” said Neelam Khan, the Chair of the Physics and Pre-Engineering Department at Georgia Gwinnett College. “Through this radar, students will learn about the applications of Doppler radar to track weather patterns and visualize the data it produces.”

Connections with the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and the Georgia Tech Research Institute will also help broaden the experience of students at Georgia Gwinnett College, a four-year public college that was founded in 2005 and now has more than 11,000 students, Khan said. All three collaborating institutions are part of the University System of Georgia.

The Furuno WR-2100 X-band weather radar was purchased in 2022 using funding from Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. It was initially placed atop a building on GTRI’s Smyrna campus, where it underwent tests while Trostel and Shepherd searched for the best location for a more permanent installation. The researchers have used the device to look at storms, generate data, and practice data analysis.

The Georgia Gwinnett location was selected because the campus location enables coverage for both Atlanta and Athens. The Gwinnett County location also helps fill potential gaps in northeast Georgia and brings a unique resource for GGC’s educational mission. The radar is now fully operational.

Owning and operating a weather radar is unusual for colleges and universities, but not surprising given the impact of severe weather in Georgia, Shepherd noted.

“Weather is a significant threat to our lives and property, particularly in Georgia,” Shepherd said. “While we have an adequate radar network from the National Weather Service and the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, there are often gaps and needs for higher resolution, more detailed information. Our institutions have entered very rare air in owning and operating a weather radar that will benefit our students, the state, and our research enterprise in the University System of Georgia institutions.”

Because they’ll be able to control the geographic areas covered by the radar and the level of detail in the information gathered, the new weather radar will be a useful tool not only for tracking storms, but also for conducting research, Trostel said. Its ability to provide highly detailed information even allows it to track the movement of insects and birds, for example.

“We can see things at higher resolution, and we have complete control over how we manipulate the radar beam to look at things,” Trostel said. “The radar is much less expensive to purchase and operate than other weather radars, which makes it a budget-friendly tool for university research.”

The instrument cost approximately $150,000 to purchase and was acquired through donations and internal funding at UGA and Georgia Tech. Shepherd and Tom Mote, the founding director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at UGA, contributed funds from institutional research budgets. A significant financial gift was also acquired from Elaine Neal, an alumna of the UGA Department of Geography and longtime donor to the University of Georgia.

At Georgia Tech, funds were provided by GTRI’s Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory, and the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory, the Georgia Tech Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, and Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

”I’m ecstatic to receive this recognition from Optica,” said Trebino, who serves as the Eminent Scholar Chair of Ultrafast Optical Physics in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. “The vast majority of science’s greatest discoveries have resulted directly from more powerful techniques for measuring light, so I decided to devote my career to this important field, and it’s very satisfying to receive this honor for my work."

Ultrashort pulses are brief bursts of light, millionths of billionths of a second long — the shortest technological events ever created. Trebino’s techniques for measuring them have made possible a host of new research and technology applications in many areas, including the fundamental studies of matter and micro-material processing.

Trebino has pioneered ultrashort-pulse measurement techniques for over three decades. In 1991, he invented the frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) technique, the first method for completely measuring arbitrary ultrashort light pulses in time. It took pulse measurement from blurry black-and-white artifact-ridden snapshots to high-resolution full-color images. The FROG technique remains the gold standard in ultrashort pulse measurement and is used worldwide in physics, chemistry, engineering, biomedical, and telecommunications applications. 

More recently, Trebino has developed devices for measuring pulses with ever shorter and ever more complex temporal — and also spatial — variations. Thanks in large part to Trebino’s techniques, these exotic light pulses have become much better understood and hence much shorter, more stable, and much more useful. His devices have also played key roles in work resulting in several recent Nobel Prizes.

Rick Trebino received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University and joined Georgia Tech in 1998 after having worked at Sandia National Laboratories. He has received numerous other awards and is a Fellow of four international scientific societies, including Optica, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and SPIE: the international society for optics and photonics.

Learn more about Trebino’s Ultrafast Optics Research Group here: frog.gatech.edu

About Optica

Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving, and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students, and others interested in the science of light. Optica’s renowned publications, meetings, online resources, and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications, and accelerate scientific, technical, and educational achievement.

Since becoming a part of the Georgia Tech faculty in 2012, where he holds a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering, Cai has played a pivotal role in advancing research on nanophotonic materials and devices. Notably, his authored work, "Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications," serves as a globally recognized textbook and reference.

Cai's accolades include the OSA/SPIE Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award, the CooperVision Science & Technology Award, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He is also a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

Optica Fellows, a select group representing no more than 10 percent of the total membership, are individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to advancing optics and photonics. The election process is highly competitive, with candidates recommended by the Fellow Members Committee and subsequently approved by the Awards Council and Board of Directors.

Alongside 128 other distinguished individuals, Cai will be honored at Optica conferences and events throughout 2024. The comprehensive list of the 2024 Optica Fellows is accessible online.

If they’re successful in using an artificial intelligence technique known as machine learning to associate potentially dozens of factors with the formation of tornadoes, the work could dramatically improve the detection of severe storms – and reduce false alarms.

“This is a great opportunity to apply machine learning to take advantage of the severe storm reports available for the past several years,” said Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “We can feed all of this information, potentially 30 or 40 different predictors, into the machine learning models and train them to identify patterns that we could potentially use to predict when tornadoes will form. Using AI, we can take on tasks that would be too challenging for humans alone.”

Using data from their ground-based lightning mapping array, the researchers also are studying “jumps” and “dives” in lightning activity to see how they may help predict the formation of tornadoes.

Overcoming the Challenges of Radar

Forecasters now rely on weather radar to identify tornadoes and predict which storms may spin them off. But in areas such as North Georgia, topographical features such as mountains can limit the ability to see lower portions of potentially-dangerous storms, while the time required for radars to update their views can cut into warning times. Electromagnetic interference also can create confusing radar results, and during large severe weather outbreaks stretching across hundreds of miles, there can be multiple storms that must be watched for signs of tornadic activity.

As a result, the development of tornadoes can be missed, while false alarms may lead citizens to disregard warnings – or wait too long to seek shelter. Based on research conducted so far, Boggs believes warnings based on machine learning techniques could be significantly faster and more accurate – and offer the potential to automate the tracking of the storms.

“With radar-based methods, there can be a high false alarm rate, as much as 60 or 70 percent,” he said. “At the same time, the probability of detection can be as low as 50 or 60 percent, which means a lot of tornadoes are missed. With these machine-learning techniques, we expect to improve on both detection and false alarm rates.”

Training Machine Learning with Detailed Storm Reports

So far, researchers have trained their machine learning system on data from 62 tornadoes resulting from 40 different storms in Georgia. In the Peach State, tornadoes commonly pop up from squall lines of storms, though supercells – larger rotating behemoths more often seen in the Midwest – also bring tornadoes into the state.

Supercells can spawn more powerful tornadoes – EF3, EF4, and EF5 – which are more dangerous to humans and destructive to property. But squall line tornadoes can also be deadly, even if they create less powerful EF0, EF1, and EF2 tornadoes, and lines of storms capable of producing them may extend across multiple states.

“One of the main benefits of this machine learning technique is that by using data from the geostationary lightning mapper on the GOES satellite, you would be able to avoid the limitations of radar,” he said. “Using satellite data, you have a huge field of view without the terrain blockages, and you can detect tornadoes over a huge distance – potentially the entire continental United States.”

Using the technique, Boggs and his colleagues are evaluating as many as 40 different parameters to see which ones may be relevant to predicting tornado formation. Among them is the pattern of electrical charge within the storms, which he compares to a genetic profile.

“A typical thunderstorm may have two or three charge regions, but the supercells could have a dozen or more separate regions,” he said. “It’s really complicated to see what’s going on with the lightning because those complex charge structures will create different types of discharges. The flash rate can be just noisy.”

Despite the potential advantages of satellite tornado prediction, Boggs believes forecasters will likely continue to use existing radar techniques, supplementing them with new technology as it develops. GTRI has submitted proposals to funding organizations to continue testing the machine learning tool, which also could be useful to countries that lack the weather radar network available to forecasters in the United States.

Analyzing Lightning ‘Jumps’ and ‘Dives’

Satellite data and machine learning aren’t the only approaches SSRC researchers are using to identify where tornadoes and other severe weather will pop up.

For several years, GTRI has operated the ground-based North Georgia Lightning Mapping Array (NGLMA) that tracks lightning bursts in North Georgia, centered on the Atlanta metropolitan area. Researchers are using radio-frequency emissions recorded by the array to study lightning flashes in an effort to correlate “jumps” – increases in lightning occurrence – and “dives” – reductions in frequency – with the development of severe storms.

The ground-based array – one of several operating in the United States – provides information not available from satellites, so the two sources are complementary, providing both optical and radio-frequency data.

The array was deployed by John Trostel, director of the SSRC, and correlates data on electromagnetic energy produced by the lightning bursts with precise timing and location information. The network of 12 ground stations tracks both lightning that interacts with the ground as well as bursts that stay in the clouds – which account for 75 percent of all lightning – providing a detailed map of electrical charge in the atmosphere.

“What we are looking for is a rapid increase in how many flashes there are over a brief period of time, on the order of a couple of minutes,” said Jessica Losego, an SSRC research meteorologist who is using a NASA-developed algorithm to study the phenomena. “If you see a jump, you can feel somewhat confident that you’re going to soon have some type of severe weather that may include damaging wind, hail, or a tornado. Analyzing this can help with all modes of severe weather, not just tornadoes.”

Losego is among the weather researchers worldwide who are also studying dives, sudden declines in lightning rates, though it’s not yet clear how – and if – they may help forecasters. The dives in lightning activity may serve as yet another indicator of the strength of a storm and how it may be changing.

How Georgia’s Severe Weather Is Different

After a tornado killed a dozen people in North Georgia in 1998, the SSRC was created by the state of Georgia to develop improved means of providing early warning of tornadoes and severe storms. Beyond topographical issues, Georgia’s tornadoes can differ from those of neighboring states in other ways, Losego noted.

“A lot of our storms come through later in the day, which means there’s less sunlight to provide energy to the storms,” she said. “The storms may start in Mississippi early in the day and may fall apart by the time they get there, but they are still dangerous. Storms that arrive late in the day or evening can make it more difficult to warn citizens who may be asleep when tornadoes are detected.”

Data gathered by the NGLMA is shared with National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters in Peachtree City, providing an additional source of information for its forecasts.

“Our goal is to provide another tool that the NWS can use to provide more warning and have more confidence in that warning,” Losego said. “Data from our lightning mapping array goes directly into their systems, and we will share what we learn about using information from jumps and dives that could improve warnings to Georgia citizens.”

The NGLMA now covers North Georgia. Because the southern part of Georgia is out of the range of the NGLMA network and can have a different set of weather conditions, the researchers would like to establish a second array to track severe storms there.

Research Supports SSRC Goals

The SSRC was created through funding from the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the state of Georgia to serve as a focal point for severe storm research in Georgia.

“The SSRC serves the state of Georgia by actively developing alternative methods for detecting and forecasting severe local storms and exploring improvements to existing storm prediction and sensor technology,” said Trostel. “We are utilizing the latest in machine learning, data analysis, and other technologies to support the goals of keeping Georgians safe from severe storms.”

Writer: John Toon (john.toon@gtri.gatech.edu)
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

“The radar would be used collaboratively to provide enhanced warning for people in North Georgia, to provide educational opportunities to students at both institutions, and to provide research opportunities for UGA’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, Georgia Tech Research Institute’s (GTRI) Severe Storms Research Center (SSRC), and Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,” said John Trostel, the SSRC’s director.

Severe weather is a consistent threat to North Georgia that can lead to loss of life and property. The new radar system will fill a well-known gap in radar coverage over northeastern Georgia caused by the existing NEXRAD network coverage and terrain. A large landfill also causes blockage of the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) beam located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Watch a video about this project on YouTube

A feed from the commercial Furuno WR-2100 radar, which will be located in Gwinnett County, will be shared with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Peachtree City, Georgia, and with other interested organizations. Beyond tornadoes and other severe storms, the radar could help forecasters predict winter precipitation and provide better rainfall estimates for flood warnings.

“The acquisition of this radar is a game-changer for our state,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of UGA’s Atmospheric Sciences Program. “Not only does it provide a potentially lifesaving service for Georgians, but it is also a unique teaching and research tool for students at both institutions.” The radar will enable new research opportunities related to severe weather observations, winter weather forecasting, urban flood assessment, birds, and even insects, Shepherd said.

John Knox, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor in the UGA Department of Geography, also envisions the radar information serving the public in another way. The student-run digital meteorology program at UGA, “WeatherDawgs,” serves over 70,000 followers across north Georgia.

“The radar would allow UGA students to learn how to view, interpret, and use X-band radar data as well as how best to communicate it to the public,” Knox said.

Jessica Losego, a research scientist at the SSRC, said the new device will support the long-term goals of the Center and expand weather-forecasting collaboration.

“This is a unique opportunity for collaboration, and we look forward to working with UGA and the NWS to maximize this radar’s utility for research, education, and operations,” Losego said. “This equipment will support our efforts to understand the evolution and dynamics of severe storms in Georgia and lead to better capabilities for tracking these storms.”

Trostel and colleagues at GTRI became aware of the radar’s availability and reached out to UGA colleagues about collaborating on the acquisition. The three-year-old device, which operates in the X-band, had been used at the manufacturer’s research facility.

The weather radar cost approximately $150,000 and was acquired through donations and internal funding at UGA and Georgia Tech. Shepherd and Tom Mote, the founding director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and an associate dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, contributed funds from institutional research budgets. A significant financial gift was also acquired from Elaine Neil, a longtime donor in the UGA Department of Geography, which houses the Atmospheric Sciences Program.

At Georgia Tech, funds were provided by GTRI’s Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory and the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory, the Georgia Tech Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, and Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

A 1998 tornado that stuck Gainesville led to the appointment of a task force to study steps that could be taken to protect citizens from future severe weather. Among its recommendations were the addition of a “gap-filling” radar for northeastern Georgia. Once it is placed in Gwinnett County after testing at GTRI, the new Georgia Tech-UGA radar will help to address that decades-old recommendation.

GTRI Communications

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Atlanta, Georgia USA

About GTRI: The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, the state, and industry. For more information, please visit www.gtri.gatech.edu.

Last year, the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a new program to improve the nation’s information and technology infrastructure. With a global chip shortage, supply chain issues, and other challenges in play, a group of Georgia Tech faculty members jumped at the opportunity to participate.

Their landing was perfect. Two new research centers, representing an investment of about $65.7 million, have been awarded to Georgia Tech through the SRC-administrated Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0, or JUMP 2.0.

JUMP 2.0 will support the work of dozens of inter-disciplinary researchers from multiple universities, tackling the technological issues of an increasingly connected world. The goal is to improve the nation’s performance, efficiency, and capabilities for both commercial and military applications.

“Georgia Tech won two of the seven centers, which is not only fantastic, but also speaks highly about the breadth and depth of our research enterprise,” said Professor Arijit Raychowdhury, the Steve W. Chaddick Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and will direct one of the new centers.

The JUMP 2.0 announcement represents the latest round of significant support advancing AI-related research at Georgia Tech. Last July, Tech received two National Science Foundation Artificial Intelligence Research awards totaling $40 million. In September, the U.S. Economic Development Administration awarded Georgia Tech $65 million to support a statewide initiative combining AI and manufacturing innovations with workforce and outreach programs.

A New Collaborative Chapter

Launching in 2023, JUMP 2.0 is the next chapter of an SRC-led alliance that formed in 2018 – the original JUMP, with its broad focus on nano-electronic computing.

JUMP 2.0 is a collaboration between SRC indust­­rial participants (IBM, Intel, Raytheon, TSMC and Samsung, to name a few) and the Department of Defense. The program asked researchers from U.S. universities to solicit proposals for collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-institute research in seven theme areas: cognition; communications and connectivity; intelligent sensing to action; systems and architectures for distributed computing; intelligent memory and storage; advanced monolithic and heterogenous integration; and high-performance energy efficient devices.

The two new research centers Georgia Tech, both headquartered within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) are:

• CoCoSys: Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (theme area: cognition), under the direction of Raychowdhury;

• CogniSense: Center on Cognitive Multispectral Sensors (theme area: intelligent sensing to action), under the direction of Saibal Mukhopadhyay, Joseph M. Pettit Professor in ECE.

Semiconductors, or microchips, are basically tiny silicon slices packed with millions of transistors that control electron activity. These chips enable all our electronic devices to work. So, a shortage of semiconductors – or a shortcoming in terms of quality and efficiency – spells trouble for sectors and industries that depend on these little bits of hardware, for example: computing, healthcare, telecommunication, security, transportation, or manufacturing.

Building a Digital Human

The goals for the JUMP 2.0 centers are lofty and wide-ranging, addressing current and future needs.

“In some sense, the question we’re addressing is, ‘how do you build a perfect digital human,’” Raychowdhury said of the Team CoCoSys mission. “We want to learn how to build systems which are aware – capable of interacting as human agents with us. For example, we want AI that can listen to a conversation between two human beings and learn from that and seamlessly merge into society.”

Current AI, Raychowdhury said, may be able to perform relatively narrow tasks better than a human, but one area that it is much less effective is human-intelligent machine collaboration. This concept has been increasingly researched in recent years as automated virtual assistants and the metaverse have entered the mainstream. As cognitive systems research moves toward creation of a digital human, it will have far-reaching impact in industry and healthcare testing, disaster relief, fully autonomous and collaborative systems, immersive training and gaming experiences, and more.

“Continuous learning through interactions with humans is missing,” Raychowdhury said. “The next generation of AI needs to comprehend nuances of human interaction, explain, and interpret visual cues and language, and be able to do that in real-time with high energy-efficiency. That’s what we want to address. That’s the meta goal of this center.”

Three other Georgia Tech faculty researchers, all from ECE, are part of Team CoCoSys: Larry Heck, Azad Naeemi, and Tushar Krishna.

“This is a diverse team in all possible ways with expertise across the board,” Raychowdhury said.

Sensors with a Brain

The ability to sense is fundamental and probably the most critical component for building an intelligent machine. “It is fundamental to nature,” said Mukhopadhyay. “We have eyes, ears, a nose, and skin to sense the environment around us.”

The CogniSense Center research team wants to develop sensors that can effectively “perceive” everything around them and, like humans, efficiently attend to the information that really matters.

Today’s electronics sensors samples everything they “see” and generate abundance of  digital data; sometime way too much for a machine store, process, and make sense. The CogniSense center’s goal is to change this paradigm by learning from biology.

“In human, sensors and the brain work together to control attention and extract only important information from everything happening around us,” said Mukhopadhyay. “Can we make electronic sensors that behave like that – cognizant and energy efficient?”

The team he’s assembled is made up of 20 researchers from 12 different institutions, including two other ECE faculty members: Justin Romberg (associate chair for research in ECE) and Muhannad Bakir (interim director of the Georgia Tech 3D Systems Packing Research Center).

“We have a diverse team with expertise in radars, optics, integrated circuits, packaging, signal processing, and artificial intelligence to build these new sensors with a brain,” said Mukhopadhyay.

Beyond Campus

Georgia Tech researchers will play critical roles in three other centers based at other universities around the country:

• PRISM: Center for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory

• ACE: Evolvable Computing for Next-Generation Distributed Computer Systems.

• CHIMES: Center for Heterogenous Integration of Microelectronic Systems

CHIMES in particular will feature a large, multi-disciplinary Georgia Tech influence including ECE’s Suman Datta, Callie Hao, and Shimeng Yu; George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering’s Suresh Sitaraman and Satish Kumar; and the center’s associate director, Bakir (doubling up on his JUMP 2.0 responsibilities as a member of both CogniSense and CHIMES).

“We are delighted in the critical and fundamental role Georgia Tech plays within CHIMES,” said Bakir. “In each of the four research themes that constitute this center, Georgia Tech faculty play a key role. This not only reflects our world class faculty, students, and staff, but also our world-class fabrication, assembly and bonding, and advanced system level prototyping facilities that will be critical in enabling next generation 3D heterogeneous and 3D monolithic circuits and systems.”

Tech's multidisciplinary research activities related to CHIMES are supported by the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN). Georgia Tech's nanotechnology core facilities, namely the IEN Micro/Nanofabrication Facility and Materials Characterization Facility, support CHIMES and other JUMP 2.0 research activities.

Establishing all of these new semiconductor research centers is the result of impeccable timing, according to Raychowdhury, who pointed out that ECE broke into the top two in national rankings by U.S. News and World Report rankings for the first time in 2022, not long after President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which provides about $280 billion in new funding to boost U.S. research and manufacturing of semiconductors.

“These research centers are part of a confluence of things that are happening simultaneously across the U.S.,” he said. “And they have implications for Georgia Tech, national security, and the independence of our national supply chain as a whole.”

Huang’s research mainly focuses on developing new mm-wave circuits and systems architectures for power amplifiers (PAs)/transmitters (TXs) with an emphasis on enhancing their bandwidth, energy efficiency, output power, and linearity and receivers (RXs) for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and networks. His proposed topology innovations surpass many existing practical limitations and act as a benchmark for future reconfigurable transceivers and MIMO systems from mm-Wave to THz aimed towards next generation wireless communication, radar, imaging, and spectrum sensing applications.

Huang received his B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the National Chiao Tung University, located in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2012, and the M.S. degree from the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering from the National Taiwan University, located in Taipei, Taiwan in 2015.

That includes making more of these chips here at home.  

The culprit was global supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The crisis has highlighted the pressing need for the U.S. to bolster its domestic semiconductor supply chains and industrial capacity, after three decades of decline as a semiconductor producer. The U.S. share of global semiconductor fabrication has dropped to 12% today, compared to 37% in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). In addition, the semiconductor industry today only accounts for 250,000 direct U.S. jobs. 

As the country rebuilds its semiconductor infrastructure at home, Georgia Tech serves as a vital partner – to train the microelectronics workforce, drive future microelectronics advances, and provide unique fabrication and packaging facilities for industry, academic and government partners to develop and test new solutions.

“We’re one of the only universities that can support the whole microelectronics stack – from new materials and devices to packaging and systems,” said Madhavan Swaminathan, the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering  and director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center.

Continue reading this research feature, Microelectronics Momentum Drives the Nation's Semiconductor Research

“One thing I love about Georgia Tech is that you have expertise in every single aspect of electronics,” said Muhannad Bakir, Dan Fielder electrical engineering professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “If I have questions on materials, devices, architectures, circuits, or even software compilers, I don’t have to look far. I turn a corner and there is that expert for you.”

Monolithic to Heterogeneous Electronics Integration

Bakir credited this breadth of knowledge at Georgia Tech with helping the Institute be a leader in shifting from monolithic microelectronics to “heterogeneous” integration. In this type of integration, separately manufactured components become part of a higher-level assembly that, in total, provides enhanced functionality and improved operating characteristics for applications.

“We have to look at a whole host of issues in order to continue to drive cost, performance and energy benefits going forward,” explained Bakir as to the reasons behind this development.

His team is identifying and optimizing the processes and materials of different microelectronic components to get the most out of each one. They then are integrating the different pieces into a single, high-performing system.  Specifically, Bakir is developing new ways to glue or wire these interconnect technologies together in a way that maximizes their performance.

“With most high-power applications, heat is a huge problem. As you build your stack by mounting  multiple chips on top of each other within a single semiconductor package, you really need to think about innovative cooling strategies,” said Bakir. “What you see today is a lot of mixing and matching of different technologies, each optimized for the function they’re performing”

To address this challenge, the Integrated 3D systems (i3DS) Lab, which Bakir directs, is working on novel chip-level microfluidic cooling techniques to enhance heat removal, an area in which Georgia Tech has unique expertise and capabilities. Georgia Tech engineering faculty have won multiple large-scale funded research grants in embedded microfluidic cooling for electronic applications, including 3D chip stacking. The teams demonstrated Georgia Tech's ability to drive advanced cooling technology solutions from fundamental design to manufacturing and integration on leading-edge electronic silicon-testbeds using in-house Georgia Tech facilities.

Bakir’s lab is also working on novel “stitch-chips” that provide a high-speed connection between neighboring chips in a package by avoiding the traditional slow interconnection through a package with high electrical losses.

Bakir considers GTRI “an incredible asset to what we do.” “They have some unique design and fabrication capabilities. Equally important is the fact that GTRI is well known internationally for being able to deliver technologies that are truly differentiated and based on unique designs and processes that we develop inhouse,” Bakir said.

High-Assurance Tools to Assess Chip Vulnerabilities

One of those partners includes Lee Lerner, chief scientist of GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection and Hardware Evaluation Research (CIPHER) Laboratory.  Lerner’s Lab develops third-party tools to conduct high-assurance microelectronics inspections for global customers like Intel and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the defense side. His team focuses on high-assurance inspection through testing technologies that provide “assurance of trust,” or peace of mind that these systems perform as expected.

“We can tell you that the tools and devices are actually doing what they're supposed to do and nothing more,” Lerner said.

An additional challenge in this space is that the current chip shortage creates more demand on older chip technologies, which have less security features or more known vulnerabilities than modern devices.

GTRI develops some of the most advanced IP and electronic security protections and features in existence. Because of this work, researchers understand which security features work and which are insufficient given the growing complexity and types of attacks at the hardware level.

According to Lerner, GTRI is making big investments over the next 10 years in building security and trust for microelectronics. In fact, the Institute’s strategic roadmap includes trusted microelectronics as a key pillar.

Increased Cybersecurity Focus 

Georgia Tech is also making big investments, such as establishing the new School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, and hiring expert faculty such as Daniel Genkin, associate professor, who officially reported on Meltdown and Spectre, two of the most widely publicized vulnerabilities in the last decade involving chips in popular devices. In addition to Lerner and Genkin, Alenka Zajić, Ken Byers Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has pioneered novel inspection techniques of microelectronics.  

“Having a good understanding of the true state of the art of security and trust features, as well as bleeding-edge vulnerabilities, help inform future generations of security protections that need to be incorporated into more devices generally, including approaches to design, so that we don't encounter those types of vulnerabilities,” he said.

Lee says more customers are paying attention to the importance of security flaws in designs and potential vulnerabilities. “They're increasingly investing more, but there still are competing factors of designing for security versus designing for performance,” he added.

He emphasized that microelectronics is fundamentally hardware, which is very expensive to change once it’s fabricated and manufactured. “If big flaws or security exploits are discovered, it's not easy to go back and distribute patches to those systems. Those flaws live on in the microelectronics… sometimes for decades in even critical systems,” Lee noted. That’s where Georgia Tech and GTRI can be a valuable partner, by contributing security and design for trust “very early on in either materials or architectures that improve trust and reliability of devices.”

On the chip innovation side, Georgia Tech faculty are leveraging the institute’s multidisciplinary strengths and semiconductor facilities to solve semiconductor development bottlenecks and improve the performance of chip technologies.

Driving In-Memory Computing

One such innovator is Shimeng Yu, associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose work on “in-memory compute” could solve the hardware bottleneck in today’s data-intensive applications that increasingly rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“Data storage is becoming more important these days. There’s so much data and information from sensors and cameras, we want to do the computation locally using the data within the memory to save on data transfer energy and bandwidth,” Yu explained.

“The memory market today focuses exclusively on data storage, and memory is expensive, accounting for nearly a third of the cost of a chip,” said Yu. His pioneering work merging the compute function with data storage is 10 times more energy-efficient than conventional approaches where data is fetched from a centralized data processor.

To realize this new computing paradigm, Yu and his team are working with the Packaging Research Center (PRC) to package their solution into a prototype and ultimately, a complete system. Their work depends on the ability to innovate at the material/device level and translate those innovations into circuits for prototype demonstrations.

“The capability to facilitate this kind of lab-to-fab tech transfer is critical,” said Yu.

While his team can explore new materials and standalone device structures in the Georgia Tech cleanroom, “we need a prototyping facility to enable large-scale, array-level demonstration for new memory technologies,” he said. “The PRC is going to help us get there, packaging our prototype into a complete system.”

“The PRC enables the heterogeneous integration of our new device technologies with commercial off-the-shelf silicon chips from commercial foundries,” he added.

Yu said his in-memory compute breakthrough is creating excitement among both traditional chip makers and non-traditional companies looking to build their own silicon chips such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla.

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent 

The Georgia Institute of Technology was the first university to offer a comprehensive curriculum on microelectronics and microsystems design and packaging and, currently, numerous faculty at Georgia Tech are widely known for their work in semiconductor and microelectronics technologies. In December of 2021 Georgia Tech researchers will again showcase how their pushes the boundaries of microelectronics technologies at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering research teams of Assistant Professor Asif Khan, partnering with Dan Fielder Professor Muhannad Bakir, and Associate Professor Shimeng Yu, partnering with Professor Sung-Kyu Lim and Assistant Professor Shaolan Li, have dominated the 2021 IEDM presentation line-up with a total of 8 accepted papers. With topics ranging from ferroelectric materials for memory, new advances in ALD process, and in-memory computing and 3D reconfigurable architectures, the research presented by these teams is at the cutting-edge of advancing computing power and consumer electronics. In addition to the research presentations, Electrical and Computing Engineering Faculty & Director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center at GT will be presenting a short course session on devoted to “Heterogenous Integration Using Chiplets & Advanced Packaging”

Noting the timely nature of these research advancements, Arijit Raychowdhory; Professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering noted, “IEDM is a premier conference in the area of semiconductor devices. Such a strong performance by GT ECE exemplifies the strength of our program, the ingenuity of our students and the innovation driven by our world-class faculty. Sincere congratulations to Professors Khan, Yu Bakir, Lim and Li for their pioneering research in semiconductor logic and memory technologies, that are critical for our nation and our industries.” 

Asif Khan is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. His work led to the first experimental proof-of-concept demonstration of the negative capacitance effect in ferroelectric oxides. His group at Georgia Tech conceptualizes and fabricates electronic devices that leverage interesting physics and novel phenomena in emerging materials (such as ferroelectrics, antiferroelectrics and strongly correlated systems) to overcome the “fundamental” limits in computation and to address the most pressing challenges in electronics and the semiconductor industry.

Shimeng Yu is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Tech. He received the B.S. degree in microelectronics from Peking University in 2009, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2011 and 2013, respectively. From 2013 to 2018, he was an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Prof. Yu’s research interests are the semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for energy-efficient computing systems. His research expertise is on the emerging non-volatile memories for applications such as deep learning accelerator, in-memory computing, 3D integration, and hardware security.

Muhannad S. Bakir is the Dan Fielder Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.  Dr. Bakir and his research group have received more than thirty paper and presentation awards including six from the IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC), four from the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC), one from the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and two from the IEEE Transactions on Components Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (TCPMT). Muhannad S. Bakir received the B.E.E. degree from Auburn University, Auburn, AL, in 1999 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Tech in 2000 and 2003, respectively. His research interests include, heterogeneous microsystem design and integration, including 2.5D and 3D ICs and packaging, electrical and photonic interconnects, and embedded cooling technologies.

Sung Kyu Lim received B.S. (1994), M.S. (1997), and Ph.D. (2000) degrees all from the Computer Science Department at UCLA. During 2000-2001, he was a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA, and a senior engineer at Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. Lim joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology an assistant professor. He is currently the director of the GTCAD (Georgia Tech Computer Aided Design) Laboratory and focuses on VLSI and 3D circuit architecture and packaging.

Shaolan Li received his B.Eng. degree with highest honor from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2012, and his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2018, all in electrical engineering. Prior joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in 2019, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin from 2018-2019. He also held intern positions in Broadcom Ltd. in Sunnyvale, California, and NXP in Tempe, Arizona during 2013-2014. His research interests are broadly in analog, mixed-signal, and RF integrated circuits. His expertise is in high-performance data converters, ultra-low-power low-cost sensor interface, and novel analog mixed-signal architectures for design automation.

The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation. Georgia Tech research teams have a strong track of record in IEDM publications in the recent years, including 8, 4, 9 and 7 papers presented in IEDM 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively.

- Christa M. Ernst

“Arijit has been a leader in ECE since arriving on campus eight years ago, serving as an executive in two of Georgia Tech’s primary electrical and computer engineering initiatives,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “This experience, along with his expansive research portfolio and contributions to industry, make Arijit the ideal person to be our next ECE chair.” 

Raychowdhury is a pioneer in energy-efficient digital and mixed-signal circuit and system research. He has contributed to foundational technologies that have been widely adopted by the leading semiconductor industries. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he held research and leadership roles at Texas Instruments and Intel. His significant research contributions included the design of the world’s first adaptive echo-cancellation network for integrated digital subscriber lines at Texas Instruments, as well as ultra-low power embedded memory technologies at Intel. Each has been used in a wide range of products. 

Raychowdhury’s Georgia Tech research focuses on the design of power converters, logic and memory circuits, and hardware design for emerging computing platforms. He and his students have won numerous awards and fellowships, including 14 best paper awards. For his contributions to the field and impact on the industry, Raychowdhury received the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s highest technical honor — the Technical Excellence Award — in 2021 and IEEE/ACM’s “Innovator Under 40 Award” in 2018.

“I am very excited and honored to serve as the next Steve W. Chaddick School Chair in ECE,” Raychowdhury said. “Our School is an amazing, vibrant, and diverse place, filled with exciting opportunities and incredible possibilities. As we move forward in this post-COVID era, let us aspire to a future where ECE will not only produce the most diverse, brightest, and most innovative engineers, but will also foster an environment of empathy and giving back to our community. I am eager to continue my collaborations with faculty, students, and staff in our collective efforts to expand ECE’s initiatives as we advance the School to the next level of excellence.” 

Raychowdhury holds 28 U.S. and international patents on various aspects of semiconductor technologies. His research has produced more than 300 articles in journals and peer-reviewed conferences and resulted in more than $21 million in sponsored research. 

In addition to his roles at Georgia Tech, Raychowdhury is currently a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Solid State Circuits Society and a mentor for IEEE Young Professionals and IEEE Women in Circuits. He has leadership roles in multiple National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corporation centers. He is also the site director for the SCALE-SoC (System-on-Chip) Workforce development program, an initiative sponsored by the Department of Defense to train the next generation of U.S. students in the area of SoC design.

Douglas Blough is currently serving as ECE’s interim chair and will return to his full-time role as professor and associate chair for faculty development in December. A diverse group of faculty, staff, and students participated in a nationwide search for the new chair. The committee was led by Susan Margulies, professor and former chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“I want to thank Susan and the committee for their leadership and guidance during the selection process,” said Beyah. “I’m also grateful to Doug for serving as our interim chair these last several months, especially as we began a new academic year.” 

Raychowdhury will succeed Magnus Egerstedt, who was named the dean of engineering at the University of California, Irvine earlier this year. 

The Technical Excellence Award, first presented in 1991, is the highest technical award presented by SRC. It recognizes research of exceptional value to SRC member companies. This award recognizes key contributors of innovative technology that significantly enhance the productivity and competitiveness of the semiconductor industry. The nominations are from the industry, indicating the extent to which the research outcomes have been applied by the industry. In the history of this award, Raychowdhury is the second Georgia Tech researcher to win this award and the third person to receive this for contributions to the design of digital VLSI circuits.

A Georgia Tech ECE faculty member since 2013, Raychowdhury leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab. He received the award for the contributions of his group in the digital linear regulator technologies for power management in Systems-on-Chips. The research conducted over the last eight years has now significantly impacted both internal research and product pathfinding in multiple SRC member companies. His nomination was supported by Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, and TSMC.

The Khan Lab is led by Asif Khan, who is an ECE assistant professor and a recent recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Intel Rising Star Award. He and his team of six Ph.D. students and two engineers research microelectronic devices to address the challenges faced by the semiconductor technology due to the end of transistor miniaturization. His group focuses on all aspects of ferroelectricity, ranging from materials physics, growth, and electron microscopy to micro-/nano-fabrication of ferroelectronic devices. This includes ferroelectric circuits and systems for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-centric applications. 

During the visit with Cabrera on August 18, Khan explained the importance of semiconductor electronics in modern times. 

“Transistors are the most abundant, man-made artifact in history; more than ten sextillion (10²²) transistors have been manufactured since the 1960s,” Khan said. “And they are the basis for the future that technology holds for us, from artificial intelligence, machine learning driven applications, autonomous transportation to space exploration, medicine, and health care.”  

Khan also gave an overview of current challenges in microelectronics. “Cloud infrastructure is estimated to account for 1 to 5 percent of worldwide energy consumption and has a significant carbon footprint equivalent to that of mid-sized countries like the Netherlands and Malaysia. Environmental impacts of microelectronics may skyrocket in the next 10 to 15 years with the massive proliferation of information technologies.” 

Khan and his team are investigating innovative approaches to curb energy usage in electronics. They gave an overview of the concept of negative capacitance, a phenomenon in ferroelectric materials that can reduce the power dissipation in transistors below the ‘fundamental’ thermodynamic limit. Negative capacitance is an area of interest in multiple fields, including materials science, condensed matter physics, and electrical engineering.  

Nujhat Tasneem, a fifth year Ph.D. student, showed a ferroelectric transistor chip fabricated at the Institute of Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), an interdisciplinary research institute at Georgia Tech. Besides its negative capacitance properties, FEFETs are also an emerging candidate in the embedded memory space for artificial intelligence applications. Tasneem's work involves characterizing the performance of FEFETs as a memory device. Some of her characterization experiments were also shown to Cabrera. The president’s visit also showcased a state-of-the-art 300 mm ferroelectric wafer that was manufactured at a semiconductor company. 

Following Tasneem’s presentation, Prasanna Ravindran, a third year Ph.D. student in the Khan Lab, in collaboration with IEN, demonstrated the use of Microsoft Hololens for remote assistance and effective collaboration for cleanroom activities. The lab started using the technology during the pandemic in order to have discussions with collaborators who were unable to travel, as well as among lab members for remote assistance and for questions about experimental setups and metrology. Khan alluded to the possibilities of using Hololens for many kinds of outreach and general awareness activities, including tours of labs and IEN cleanrooms for K-12 students. Afterwards, Ravindran gave an overview of his cryogenic measurement setup which can measure devices down to 4 K. 

Cabrera shared stories of his personal journey, including his diverse professional training in telecommunications engineering and cognitive psychology, and his different leadership roles spanning two different continents. He also mentioned the changing landscape of the metro Atlanta area, especially with the recent arrival of a couple of big-tech companies. Blough described the important role that the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is playing on the national stage in the areas of semiconductors and nanotechnology.  

The visit concluded with an inspiring note from Cabrera to the students and the attendees: “It is always important to remember the impact of your work on society. During the course of a Ph.D., while you are laser-focused on a specific problem, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture,” he said. “In your case, you are addressing a grand challenge that may in some shape or form impact all of us and the ones who will come after us.” 

Photo credits: Ashlee Gardner

Cressler has been a prolific researcher and educator in the development of novel micro/nanoelectronic and photonic devices, circuits, and systems using nanoscale silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloys. He and his team apply these technologies to next-generation communications systems, ground and space-based radar and remote sensing systems, quantum science, and planetary exploration missions.

A proud Georgia Tech alumnus, Cressler graduated with his B.S. degree in physics in 1984. He spent eight-and-a-half years at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990, and then worked for 10 years on the ECE faculty at Auburn University. Cressler joined Georgia Tech in 2002 as a professor in ECE, and from 2004-2013, he held the title of Ken Byers Professor. He was appointed as the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics in 2013 and as a Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion in 2017.

Cressler and his students have produced over 750 refereed journal and conference papers. He has written three textbooks, edited three others, and written 31 book chapters. He is also a part-time novelist and has published three historical novels set in medieval Muslim Spain, with a fourth nearing completion.

During his career at Georgia Tech, Cressler has received over 100 research grants and contracts, totaling more than $30 million. He has graduated 62 Ph.D. students during his career, 53 of whom received their degrees from Georgia Tech. Cressler also serves as the associate director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, a position that he has held since 2015. Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards for his research accomplishments, including being named an IEEE Fellow and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal recipient.

Cressler is highly dedicated to his classroom teaching and student mentoring. He is a mainstay in the microelectronics instructional program in ECE for both the undergraduate and graduate students. His book, Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors, is the most widely referenced book in this area and is used as a textbook for graduate classes at a number of universities.

Cressler also teaches two highly popular courses that are open to all Georgia Tech undergraduate students. CoE 3002 —Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution serves both the Technology and Management Program and the Honors Program, while IAC 2002—Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue serves the Georgia Tech-Emory Leadership and Multifaith Program Partnership.

Cressler has received numerous local, national, and international teaching and mentoring honors throughout his career. Earlier this year, he received the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan Education Medal “for inspirational teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.” In 2020, Cressler received the Outstanding Educator Award from the IEEE Atlanta Section, and in 2013, he received Georgia Tech’s highest award for faculty, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Cressler has been an active member and leader in his professional communities and at Georgia Tech. He has held leadership roles in four different IEEE societies, including as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. Cressler led an Institute-level task force on the Georgia Tech Honors Program that helped to strengthen the program’s mission and better serve students’ needs. Currently, he serves on a Georgia Tech committee focused on supporting mental health, substance abuse, and suicide prevention efforts on campuses throughout the University System of Georgia.

“John is exceptionally deserving of being named as a Regents Professor, and I am very happy that the University System Board of Regents and the Georgia Tech administration have chosen John to hold this title,” said Douglas M. Blough, the Interim Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE. “He is an outstanding research scholar and teacher, an inspirational mentor to his students, and a dedicated member of his professional and campus communities. He has our heartfelt thanks for all that he has done for ECE and Georgia Tech, and we are fortunate to have him as a colleague and friend.”

Representing TiE Atlanta, the Insight Optics team consists of Tech students Aaron Enten and TJ Lagrow. Their business venture delivers a mobile-adapted platform that enables primary care physicians to efficiently detect early signs of avoidable blindness before permanent damage is done. They were mentored by Greg Cory, Neeti Dewan, and Eric Ensor from TiE Atlanta.

The team received a $5,000 cash prize sponsored by the Naadam Foundation and a $4,000 grant from the REAN Foundation. Insight Optics was also “Best In Class” at the startup boot camp hosted by TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs) in Silicon Valley in early May.

Insight Optics competed with 27 winning teams from across the globe including teams from TiE chapters in seven countries and three continents. The teams were mentored by local TiE chapters and supported by global workshops, startup boot camps, and mock sessions.

First prize went to TiE Toronto’s ALT TEX, whose founders are from York University and the University of Toronto. Their venture focuses on sustainable textiles engineered from food products, tackling two important issues — food waste and pollution caused by textile production. 

The second prize winner was TiE Dallas’ SURVIVR, whose founder is from the University of Texas at Dallas. The company aims to make communities safer by providing immersive police training using virtual reality. 

Chapter winners went through a semifinal round on May 15. The virtual event was viewed by more than 500 audience members from around the world, and TiE Atlanta’s executive director, Amyn Sadruddin, hosted a semifinals track. Teams pitched business ideas such as bio-toilets, career fulfillment tools for higher education, technology-enabled artificial limbs, and tech kits for 21st-century education, among others.

The event also featured a fireside conversation between Jagdish Sheth, professor of business at Emory University, and Mumbai-based entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala. The co-founder and chairman of Upgrad, an online edtech startup, Screwvala inspired young entrepreneurs to take risks. 

“This year, TiE University extended the concept of entrepreneurship to form a stronger ecosystem, even more strategically focused to dovetail multiple enablers,” said Paul Lopez, founder and co-chair of the TiE University Program. “Thanks to the generosity of sponsors, this year’s total cash prizes were $65,000, plus in-kind awards of over $600,000 to empower college entrepreneurs.”

Eight university teams made it to the finals of the global pitch fest. In addition to the top three winning teams, the other finalists were TiE Austin’s Clocr, a digital legacy management and emergency planning platform; TiE Chennai’s Kitab, a digital PDF reader that redefines the way technical literature and textbooks are consumed; TiE Dubai’s Small World that connects NGOs and high school students; TiE D.C.’s Early Intervention Systems that builds software and algorithms to enhance eldercare; and TiE New Jersey’s Sulis, a low-cost water sanitization device.

The keynote speaker was Sheel Tyle, founder and CEO of venture capital global firm Amplo. Interviewed by TiE Coimbatore’s Pradeep Yuvaraj, Tyle had some advice for entrepreneurs: “Whether you spend time doing something small or doing something big, it actually takes the same time. If you’re going to spend your precious time on something, do it where your time has the greatest impact on the world.”

Cressler and Romberg were both honored with IEEE medals at the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit (IEEE VIC Summit) and Honors Ceremony, held virtually May 11-13, 2021. Cressler was honored with the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal for a career of outstanding contributions to education in the fields of interest to IEEE. Romberg was honored as a co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for outstanding contributions in signal processing.

John D. Cressler

As the recipient of the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, Cressler was honored “for inspirational teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.” He was recognized with this award on May 11 by IEEE President-Elect Ray Liu.

Cressler is the third faculty member from ECE to receive this honor. Previous recipients include Ronald W. Schafer (1992) and James D. Meindl (1990, while with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). The James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal was established in 1956 and is sponsored by Lockheed Martin, MathWorks, Pearson, and the IEEE Life Members Fund.

“This is a tremendous honor for John, and his commitment to teaching and mentoring — and to the success and well-being of our students – is a tremendous model for all of us to follow,” said Magnus Egerstedt, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in ECE.

Cressler is the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics and the Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion at Georgia Tech. He has been the associate director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center since 2015. Cressler joined the Georgia Tech ECE faculty in 2002 after spending a decade as a faculty member in the Department of ECE at Auburn University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics at Columbia University and his B.S. degree in physics from Georgia Tech in 1984.

Cressler couples his passions for teaching and mentoring with being the leader of one of the largest, most visible, and most productive silicon-germanium (SiGe) research groups in the world. He and his colleagues have written over 700 refereed journal and conference papers, and he has graduated over 100 Ph.D. and master’s students who are now leaders in the electronics industry, academia, and government and research labs or who have started their own successful companies.

Cressler is a mainstay in the microelectronics instructional program in ECE and has introduced first-of-a-kind courses – CoE 3002 Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution and ECE 6444 Silicon-based Heterostructure Devices and Circuits – that use textbooks that he has written and that have been adopted by other universities around the world. He also teaches IAC 2002 Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. This course is open to undergraduate students of all years and majors and has always been positively received by the students.

Cressler has received many top teaching and mentoring awards from Georgia Tech and from IEEE and Eta Kappa Nu. His goal for his Ph.D. students is to fall in love with research, while maintaining a good work-life balance, and to provide a safe place to fail and to be creative and innovative. In the classroom, Cressler believes that the keys to success are passion for what you teach, being real, being and sharing who you are and what you believe with your students, and being approachable and showing that you care.

Cressler said that teaching is his life and vocation, and he counts teaching and mentoring as his great passion in the classroom, lab, and life. “My accomplishments are best measured by the success of my students,” Cressler said. “Receiving an award for teaching and mentoring, which is something very close to my heart, means a great deal to me.”

To view Cressler’s award presentation from the IEEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony, please visit https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/communities/awards-hall-c-day-1-ieee-vic-summit-and-honors-ceremony. His presentation starts at the 6:40 mark.

Justin K. Romberg

As a co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, Romberg was honored “for groundbreaking contributions to compressed sensing.” He received this medal with his colleagues, Emmanuel Candes, who holds The Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Romberg and his colleagues were recognized with this award on May 12 by IEEE President-Elect Liu. He is the fourth faculty member from ECE to receive this honor. Previous recipients include Thomas P. Barnwell (2014), Ronald W. Schafer (2010), and James H. McClellan (2004). The IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal was established in 1995 and is sponsored by the Kilby Medal Fund.

“This is a tremendous honor for Justin, and our amazing faculty track record in receiving this award speaks of the high regard in which our digital signal processing program is held around the world,” said Egerstedt.

Romberg holds the Schlumberger Professorship and is the associate chair for Research in ECE. He is also the senior director for the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. Romberg joined the ECE faculty in 2006 after working as a postdoctoral scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Caltech for three years. He received his B.S.E.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University in 1997, 1999, and 2004, respectively.

Romberg, Candes, and Tao were recognized for their 2006 paper, “Robust Uncertainty Principles: Exact Reconstruction from Highly Incomplete Frequency Information,” which demonstrated that structured signal samples could be reconstructed perfectly from very few samples. The paper established the field of compressed sensing, which is considered one of the most important developments in signal processing in the last 50 years.

This paper spurred a flurry of research activities, with engineers and scientists exploring ways to use compressed sensing in a variety of applications. Compressed sensing has been used in wireless sensor networks, more efficient data aggregation, and improved data recovery, and has resulted in energy-efficient network routing protocols, reduced data transmission requirements, and improved network security.

Compressed sensing has even been used in astrological imaging and medical imaging. The first images of black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope were based on compressed sensing reconstruction methods. However, the greatest success of compressed sensing can be found in MRI imaging, where the technology is used to shorten the imaging process drastically without losing image quality.

Romberg said that one of the best things about the work in compressed sensing is how it has introduced him to ideas and people in many different areas of applied mathematics, such as harmonic analysis, optimization, and applied probability and statistical learning.

“It has been extremely rewarding to be exposed to new ideas from these fields by interacting with researchers on a common problem set,” Romberg said. “It has also been a pleasure to see how this early work was translated into different problem domains and built a strong foundation for me across disciplinary research, which is something that I have valued throughout my career.”

To view Romberg’s award presentation from the IEEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony, please visit https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/communities/awards-hall-a-day-2-ieee-vic-summit-and-honors-ceremony. His presentation starts at the 4:55 mark.

-Christa M. Ernst

For More Information on the Photonics Program Contact:

Maria Matheson [maria.matheson@ien.gatech.edu]
Program & Operations Manager
Georgia Electronic Design Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
C: 770-833-3029

Stephen Ralph [stephen.ralph@ece.gatech.edu]
Director, Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC)
Professor—School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swaminathan is the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics and Microsystems Packaging in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center. He developed this software in collaboration with his graduate students and his collaborators in the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML), which is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program; Swaminathan serves as the Site Director for CAEML. The NSF IUCRC program enables cutting-edge research on emerging technologies to benefit manufacturing sectors.

Read more about Swaminathan’s project on the NSF IUCRC website

Raychowdhury has been a member of the ECE faculty since January 2013. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a research scientist at Intel for five years and graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2007. 

Prior to attending graduate school, Raychowdhury worked as an analog design researcher for Texas Instruments for one-and-a half-years. His research interests are in low power digital and mixed-signal circuit design, design of power converters and sensors, and exploring interactions of circuits with device technologies. He serves as the co-director of the Georgia Tech Quantum Alliance, which is part of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology.

Raychowdhury leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, where he advises 14 Ph.D. students, four postdoctoral researchers, three undergraduate researchers, and one master’s student. Recent work from his group includes the invention of a battery-less camera system, time-encoded analog signal processing for ultra-low power Edge-Intelligence and Edge-Robotics, a unified voltage-frequency controller loop for mobile platforms, adaptive digital control for linear regulators for embedded power management, and circuits that enable advanced memory technologies. 

His students have won prestigious fellowships and 13 best paper awards, and his team’s work has been publicized in the technical and popular press, including CNN, Wired, TechCrunch, R&D Magazine, and Phys.org. To date, Raychowdhury has graduated seven Ph.D. students and seven master’s students. He holds 24 U.S. and international patents and has published six book chapters and over 200 refereed journal and conference papers. He serves on technical program committees for several IEEE conferences. 

Raychowdhury led Georgia Tech’s effort to establish two research centers chartered by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Applications and Systems-driven Center for Energy-Efficient Integrated NanoTechnologies (ASCENT), which is led by the University of Notre Dame, investigates the next generation of platform technologies that will enable break-through performance and energy-efficient computing platforms. The Center for Brain-Inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence (C-BRIC), which is led by Purdue University, focuses on the next frontiers of artificial intelligence, both in terms of algorithms and hardware perspectives.

Equally committed to teaching and providing meaningful experiences for undergraduate and graduate students, Raychowdhury teaches courses in advanced VLSI systems, digital system design, and the physical foundations of computing. He is the site director for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)-sponsored SCALE Workforce Development Program for System-on-Chip (SoC) Design, which is a partnership with Purdue, The Ohio State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. This effort is focused on developing an SoC design curriculum, involvement of undergraduate students in research, and placement of students in internships in government labs and the DoD. 

Raychowdhury was ECE’s first recipient of the National Science Foundation CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, which he received in 2015. He was chosen for the IEEE/ACM Innovator under 40 Award in 2018, the Intel Faculty Award in 2015, and the Qualcomm Faculty Award in 2020. Prior to his arrival at Georgia Tech, Raychowdhury 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.

Hossein Taghinejad’s thesis is entitled “Synthesis of Alloys and Lateral Heterostructures of Atomically Thin Transition-Metal Dichalocogenides for Optoelectronic Applications.” Breakthroughs in microelectronics and advances in material development have always worked in tandem. Currently, microelectronics needs to adjust itself to welcome the era of quantum computing. In collaboration with his colleagues who work on ECE Professor Ali Adibi’s team, Taghinejad developed a quantum platform made of heterogeneous integration of atomically thin semiconductors, known as 2D semiconductors, with applications in the next generation of transistors and optoelectronic devices. Advised by Adibi, Taghinejad graduated in August 2020 and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mohammad Taghinejad’s thesis is entitled “Active and Nonlinear Nanophotonics Facilitated by Hot-Carrier Dynamics.” As electronics approaches its intrinsic speed limitations, pursuing new computational paradigms for data processing is inevitable. Optical computing – replacing electrons with photons – has been introduced as a powerful alternative. The success of optical computing depends on the realization of optical switches to fulfill the role of electronic transistors in optical platforms. During his Ph.D. research, under the supervision of ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai, Taghinejad employed nonlinear optical effects to design and implement ultracompact optical switches with terahertz operation speed and very low energy consumption. Taghinejad graduated in December 2020 and is now a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. 

Mehrdad Tahmasbi’s thesis is entitled “Covert Communication: From Classical Channels to Quantum Channels.” Tahmasbi worked on a recently-explored notion of security called undetectability of a communication protocol. With an abundance of adversarial activities around modern communication systems, an unauthorized party could potentially extract useful information from the very existence of communication. Tahmasbi studied the fundamental limits of communication in several scenarios of interest, with the additional constraint that its probability of detection should remain negligible. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Matthieu Bloch, Tahmasbi graduated in May 2020 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). 

Hakki Mert Torun’s thesis is entitled “Machine Learning Based Design and Optimization for High-Performance Semiconductor Packaging and Systems.” As the demand for high-performance electronics increase, designing such systems becomes more and more complex. Conventional design methodologies either can’t handle such complexity or are too slow and significantly delay design closure. This thesis presents new, machine learning based modeling and optimization methodologies as a way to develop a fast and accurate design framework that can handle complexity of modern-day semiconductor systems. Advised by ECE Professor Madhavan Swaminathan, Torun graduated in October 2020 and is now a power integrity engineer with Apple in San Diego, California.

Siddharth Varughese’s thesis is entitled “Performance Analysis and Impairment Identification in Optical Communication Systems.” Over the past 50 years, optical communications systems have grown tremendously, achieving exceptional data rates and reaches owing to the introduction of various techniques and technologies. However, as optical networks continue to grow, these techniques and technologies will introduce new limitations to all optical communications systems. The objectives of Varughese’s research were to identify how these techniques and technologies would affect link performance, manufacturing efficiency, and network operation and maintenance, and develop methodologies to mitigate or minimize these limitations for future internet-based applications, such as 5G mobile communication, Internet of Things, and smart appliances. Advised by ECE Professor Stephen Ralph, Varughese graduated in December 2020 and is now a staff optical development engineer for subsea solutions at Infinera Corporation, located in Savage, Maryland.

Pamela Bhatti

Matthieu Bloch

Wenshan Cai

Alenka Zajic

Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure

Lukas Graber

Tushar Krishna

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

This Class of 1934 distinction is one of several recognitions made annually by CTL to instructors and recognizes faculty members with exceptional response rates and scores on the Course-Instructor Opinion Surveys (CIOS). A high response rate (85 percent or greater) is required for consideration, and the composite scores for three CIOS items are used to rank instructors. Recognition is given to instructors who teach both small classes and large classes. Small classes are defined as having at least 15 students and being no larger than 39 students, and large classes are defined as 40 students or larger. 

“Having nine faculty members receive this honor from the Center for Teaching and Learning is truly remarkable,” said Magnus Egerstedt, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in ECE. “I’d like to encourage all of these faculty members to keep up the excellent work. We are very proud of you and your achievements.” 

ECE faculty members who received this honor are listed below. They are divided into who taught small classes and who taught large classes. 

Small classes

Asif Khan is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 8863 Quantum Computing Devices and Hardware. He is an assistant professor and has been with ECE since 2017.

Bernard Kippelen is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 3025 Electromagnetics. He is the Joseph M. Pettit Professor and has been with ECE since 2003.

Frank Li is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 8803 Empirical Computer Security. He is an assistant professor and has been with ECE since 2020.

Benjamin Yang is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 3025 Electromagnetics.  A frequent instructor of ECE courses since 2016, Yang is a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s (GTRI) Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory and has been with GTRI since 2015.

Large classes

Muhannad Bakir is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 6450 Introduction to Microelectronics Technology. He is the Dan Fielder Professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2009.

Nivedita Bhattacharya is being recognized for her outstanding teaching in ECE 2020 Fundamentals of Digital System Design. She is a lecturer and has been on the ECE faculty since 2020.

Matthieu Bloch is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 6254 Statistical Machine Learning. He is an associate professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2009. 

Omer Inan is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 4781 Biomedical Instrumentation. He is an associate professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2013. 

Sung Kyu Lim is being recognized for his outstanding teaching in ECE 2020 Fundamentals of Digital System Design. He is a professor and has been on the ECE faculty since 2001.

After earning his Ph.D. in ECE from Georgia Tech in 2008, Bloch joined the ECE faculty in 2009, where he is currently an associate professor. He was first based at the Georgia Tech-Lorraine campus and then moved to the Atlanta campus in 2013. Bloch also earned a Ph.D. in engineering sciences from Université de Franche-Comté in 2006, the M.S.E.C.E. degree from Georgia Tech in 2003, and the Diplome d’Ingénieur from Supélec in 2003. 

Bloch’s educational and research interests are in information theory and error control coding, with a focus on how to make communication systems more efficient and secure. He leads the Adaptive Communication, Decision, and Information Systems Laboratory, where he advises three Ph.D. students. Bloch has graduated five Ph.D. students and has worked with 20 M.S. special problems students, seven undergraduate researchers, two postdoctoral fellows, and four visiting scholars. He has published one book, Physical Layer Security in Wireless Communications, and he is the author of 41 refereed journal papers and 82 refereed conference papers. He holds two patents.  

Bloch has devoted much time and effort to enhancing education for both undergraduate and graduate students. Since 2017, he has developed flipped course material for ECE 3084 Signals and Systems. Bloch advises a team with the Vertically Integrated Projects program that is known as Agile Communication Architecture. The team was established in spring 2018 to develop the next generation of intelligent radios and to explore the opportunities that are possible through the convergence of machine learning and software defined radios. As part of his activities with the Decision and Control Laboratory, Bloch launched a white board seminar series in fall 2019 to build a sense of community among students and professors and to remove the artificial barriers that exist between labs and research areas. He has also developed open-access resources for ECE 6254 Statistical Machine Learning.

In his professional field, Bloch served as a guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Information Theory this year. He is currently an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Bloch has been elected to the Board of Governors for the IEEE Information Theory Society for the past four years and will be the society's 2nd Vice President in 2021. He has worked on technical program committees and in other leadership roles for different conferences in information theory and communications.

Bloch has been a very active citizen in the ECE community. He has been a member of the ECE Graduate Committee since 2009 and has served as its chair for the last three years. Bloch has been a member of the Strategic Planning Strategic Doing Committee, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair Search Committee, and the Faculty Recruitment Committee. He also served on the ad hoc Innovation and Education Committee and the recent Faculty Life Action Committee. He also serves as an associate member of the ECE Statutory Advisory Committee. 

Bloch was recognized with the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2019 and the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award in 2018. The Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning has also recognized him with several honors, including a Class of 1934 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award in 2012 and being named to the Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program in 2012 and the Hesburgh Teaching Fellows Program in 2017.

Joining him in receiving this award are his coauthors Chaitanya Krishna Chekuri, Nael Mizanur Rahman, Majid Ahadi Dolatsara, and Hakki Torun, who are all ECE Ph.D. students, and ECE Professors Madhavan Swaminathan, Saibal Mukhopadhyay, and Sung Kyu Lim. Kim is advised by Lim, Chekuri and Rahman are advised by Mukhopadhyay, and Dolatsara and Torun are advised by Swaminathan.

The title of the award-winning paper is "Silicon vs. Organic Interposer: PPA and Reliability Tradeoffs in Heterogeneous 2.5D Chiplet Integration." The optimal selection of an interposer substrate is crucial in 2.5D systems, because its physical, material and electrical characteristics govern the overall system performance, reliability, and cost. Several materials have been proposed that offer various tradeoffs, including silicon, organic, and glass. In this paper, the research team conduct a quantitative comparison between two 2.5D integrated circuit (IC) designs based on silicon vs. liquid crystal polymer (LCP) interposer technologies for the first time. The team also investigates tradeoffs in power, performance and area (PPA), signal integrity (SI), and power integrity (PI), depending on the interposer technologies. Their benchmark is a large-scale RISC-V multi-core processor that is comparable to commercial products in terms of performance. Their designs are done at GDS-level and simulated with commercial quality sign-off tools that are developed by the team. This research is funded by the DARPA Electronics Resurgent Initiative under the CHIPS program.

2.5D heterogeneous integration of micro-electronics components using interposer technologies is rapidly becoming the norm in industry these days. Today, we find 2.5D chips from NVIDIA GPUs, AMD processors, and Intel machine learning accelerators. The place where micro-electronic components such as cores, memory, RF, analog, and sensors that are manufactured using different technologies and need to be integrated together, interposers are fast replacing the traditional System-on-Chip approach that is based on single chip.

Photo caption (clockwise from upper left): Jinwoo Kim, Chaitanya Krishna Chekuri, Nael Mizanur Rahman, Majid Ahadi Dolatsara, Madhavan Swaminathan, Saibal Mukhopadhyay, Sung Kyu Lim, and Hakki Torun. 

Meindl was a giant in the world of semiconductors and a gentleman of the highest magnitude. He came to Georgia Tech in 1993, where he joined ECE as the Joseph M. Pettit Chair Professor in Microsystems and served as the director of the Microelectronics Research Center (MiRC) until his retirement in 2013. 

Meindl served as the founding director of the Nanotechnology Research Center, which eventually became what is now known as the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology. His arrival at Georgia Tech brought immediate visibility to the Institute, and his leadership was immediately and positively felt in the development of microelectronics research and education.

Meindl was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in 1958, 1956, and 1955, respectively, in electrical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). He was an outstanding leader in four distinct venues for 50-plus years. 

From 1959-67, at the U.S. Army Electronics Laboratories, Meindl worked with integrated circuits (ICs) – a field then barely six months old – and served consecutively as section leader, branch chief, and founding director of the Integrated Electronics Division, made up of 80 people with responsibility for all USAEL R&D efforts in microelectronics. Meindl worked with early industry pioneers, who taught him about ICs, and he then began his own research, trying to figure out how to make an IC operate at a power level so low that it could be used inside a helmet as part of a radio receiver. 

From 1967-1986, at Stanford University, Meindl served as founding director of the Integrated Circuits Laboratory, director of the Stanford Electronics Laboratories, associate dean for research in the School of Engineering, and founding co-director of the Center for Integrated Systems, which was a model for university and industry cooperative research in microelectronics. 

While at Stanford, Meindl developed low-power integrated circuits and sensors for a portable reading aid for the blind, miniature wireless radio telemetry systems for biomedical research, and non-invasive ultrasonic imaging and blood-flow measurement systems. From 1986-1993, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), he served as senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.

At Georgia Tech, Meindl was the MiRC director for 20 years, where he pursued work on different solutions for solving interconnectivity problems that arise from trying to interconnect billions of transistors within a tiny chip. Meindl was also the founding director of the SIA/DOD Interconnect Focus Center, leading a national team of more than 60 faculty members from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, RPI, Cornell University, SUNY-Albany, and Georgia Tech. In 2006, he became founding director of the Nanotechnology Research Center, the largest dual facility cleanroom in the southeastern United States, bringing together physical sciences and engineering and biological and biomedical nanotechnology research capabilities. The Marcus Nanotechnology Building, which housed the Center, was opened in 2009. His record of leadership in microelectronics and nanotechnology is unmatched.

Meindl published over 600 articles and four books, and he was issued 23 patents. From 1966-1971, he served as the founding editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. Meindl’s 90 Ph.D. graduates from Stanford, RPI, and Georgia Tech have had a profound impact on the semiconductor industry and on academia in many roles, including as corporate CEOs, university presidents, and deans. Among those Ph.D. graduates are three current Georgia Tech ECE faculty members, Muhannad Bakir, Jeff Davis, and Azad Naeemi. Even after graduation, alumni of his research groups considered Meindl as a person they turned to when trying make career and life decisions. He was also determined to pass on to his students his ability to see industry needs far into the future.

Meindl’s leadership and technical awards are many, but a short list includes the 2016 Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award, 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor, 2004 SRC Aristotle Award, 2001 Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, 2000 IEEE Third Millennium Medal, 1999 SIA University Research Award, 1991 ASEE Benjamin Garver Lamme Medal, and 1990 IEEE Education Medal. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Life Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu, and a Life Member of Sigma Xi.

While Meindl’s influence on his own Ph.D. students is unquestionable, he made a significant and lasting impact on the Georgia Tech ECE faculty, as well as his many colleagues in the U.S. and around the world. We have been truly honored to have had Jim Meindl as our colleague, mentor, and friend.

Taghinejad is a Ph.D. candidate at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Under the supervision of ECE Professor Wenshan Cai, he is studying the optically excited states of various materials such as metals, semiconductors, and conductive oxides to develop ultrafast optical switches and light modulators. His goal is to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art electronics and ultrafast optics to introduce practical methodologies for high-speed and low-energy hybrid electro-optical data processing units. Taghinejad is the recipient of the 2020 ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Award from the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. 

In 2020, the Society is awarding $298,000 in education scholarships to 78 outstanding SPIE student members, based on their potential contribution to optics and photonics or to a related discipline. Award-winning applicants were evaluated, selected, and approved by the SPIE Scholarship Committee, chaired by SPIE volunteer Kate Medicus. Through 2019, SPIE has distributed over $6 million dollars in individual scholarships. This ambitious effort reflects the Society's commitment to education and to the next generation of optical scientists and engineers around the world. 

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves more than 255,000 constituents from 183 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library. In 2019, SPIE provided more than $5.6 million in community support, including scholarships and awards, outreach and advocacy programs, travel grants, public policy, and educational resources. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chair was endowed in 1998 by Glen P. Robinson, Jr., a pioneer in satellite communications and electro-optics technology, and has since been a source of significant applied research, creating a strong program and accomplishments within GTRI.

Ralph’s appointment to the Glen Robinson Chair will complement his newly established joint appointment status within GTRI and ECE. Furthermore, the appointment provides a platform in which he will be able to work with organizational leadership and research faculty to develop and shape a world-class program in integrated photonics and electro-optics. Ralph will also focus on the performance of internal and sponsored research and will continue leading the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) to enhance the existing collaborative relationship that he has already established with GTRI and its Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory (EOSL).

“The appointment of Dr. Ralph to this position will ensure that we continue to strengthen and maximize the interactions between the researchers in the Colleges and those in GTRI,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “Those critical collaborations are the foundation for a truly impactful research enterprise as Georgia Tech looks to address local, national, and global issues.”

A Fellow of the OSA and an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Photonics Society, Ralph has been a member of the ECE faculty since 1998, and he has served as the director of GEDC since 2011. Ralph currently leads a research team of 10 graduate students focused on wideband optical systems including machine learning, integrated photonics, microwave photonics, and quantum communications. He has published more than 325 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conference proceedings and holds 15 patents in the fields of optical communication and signal processing. 

Prior to his career at Georgia Tech, Ralph held a postdoctoral position at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a visiting scientist with the Optical Sciences Laboratory at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his B.E.E. degree from Georgia Tech in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1988.

In a study published March 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers described how a class of water soluble liquid crystals, called lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals, exhibited unexpected characteristics that could be harnessed for use in sensors and other potential applications.

"We were seeking to understand the aggregation and phase behavior of these plank-like molecules as a function of temperature and concentration," said Karthik Nayani, a former Georgia Tech student who worked on the problem. "When observed under crossed polarizers in an optical microscope, liquid crystals can exhibit beautiful textures that hint toward how the molecules themselves are arranged."

To answer some fundamental questions pertaining to the material’s phase behavior, the researchers used the microscopes to observe the molecules’ textures when they were confined to droplets known as tactoids.

"Surprisingly, we found a configuration that hasn’t been seen before in the 70 years that people have been studying liquid crystals," said Mohan Srinivasarao, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "Historically, liquid crystals in tactoids conform to what is known as a bipolar and a bipolar configuration with a twist. At lower concentrations, we found that these liquid crystals arrange in a concentric fashion, but one that appears to be free of a singular defect."

The researchers then used a simple model of the aggregation behavior of these molecules to explain these surprising results. Further, spectroscopic experiments using polarized Raman microscopy were performed to confirm their findings.

These new findings add to the growing understanding of how chromonic liquid crystals could be used in sensing applications, Srinivasarao said. The crystals are water soluble and respond dramatically to being confined to certain patterns – such as tactoidal droplets – concentrations, and temperatures. The material’s responsiveness to altering its environment could potentially be used to sense the chirality – or "handedness" – of molecules, Srinivasarao said.

"These materials don’t have a chiral center but they exhibit a chiral structure,” Srinivasarao said. "That in itself is very interesting."

That finding could be useful in answering those kinds of questions, he said.

"There are lots of people studying why on planet Earth all amino acids have a handedness, one and not the other," Srinivasarao said. "Where does this handedness come from?"

This material is based upon work supported by the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Karthik Nayani, Jinxin Fu, Rui Chang, Jung Ok Park, and Mohan Srinivasarao, “Using chiral tactoids as optical probes to study the aggregation behavior of chromonics,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2017)

Offered beginning in 2013, this grant program has seeded sixty projects with students working in ten different schools in COE and COS, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 3 other universities.

In addition to IEN cleanroom and characterization lab access for the next year, the 4 students in this round, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, will be provided travel support to present their findings at a technical conference. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in quantum computing, microfluidics, and new materials for electronic and biomedical applications.

Fall 2019 IEN Facility Seed Grant Awards:

Synthesis and Characterization of Functional Hierarchically Porous Metal-Organic Frameworks
PI: Sankar Nair
Student: Arvind Ganesan
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Quantum Paraelectricity in Hafnia-Zirconia based Ferroic Materials for Quantum Computing
PI: Asif Khan
Student: Muhammad Mainul Islam
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Microfabrication and Characterization of Phononic Topological Insulators
PI: Michael Leamy and Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb
Student: Emily Kliewer
School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering

Microfabrication of Cell Biomarker Extraction Platform for Inline Intracellular Analysis
PI: Andrei Fedorov
Student: Austin Culberson
School of Mechanical Engineering

Doolittle is a proud, two-time Georgia Tech alumnus, earning his B.E.E. degree with highest honors in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1996. After graduating with his doctorate, he worked as a research engineer in ECE for five years and then joined the School's academic faculty in 2001. Doolittle leads the Advanced Semiconductor Technology Facility, which has an estimated equipment capitalization of $6 million. 

Doolittle advises eight Ph.D. students who work in the areas of microelectronic fabrication, materials growth, characterization, neuromorphic computational devices, power, high frequency transistors, and optoelectronic devices. To date, he has graduated 23 Ph.D. students, 12 master’s students, and 45 undergraduate students.      

Doolittle pioneered the area of hyper doping of wide bandgap semiconductors, which has enabled the creation of new devices that use quantum mechanical processes to reduce power losses and to allow new ways of interconnecting advanced power and optoelectronic devices. He also pioneered the synthesis of lithium-metal-oxides, which have recently gained traction for very low power neuromorphic devices; these devices emulate human brain functionality.

From 2003-2009, Doolittle was the first assistant professor at Tech to win a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) award, and in fact, he was the lead PI on two MURI programs during this period. These initiatives focused on the development of next generation epitaxial systems for three-dimensional epitaxy. Doolittle and his team developed and exploited epitaxial multifunctional oxides, a newly developing family of materials that seek to interconnect at the atomic scale using more than one environmental force in order to facilitate the development of new sensors and actuators. One example of materials that were birthed out of this field are “multiferroics,” where electric fields can tune magnetic moments. The latter MURI was an extension of his NSF CAREER Award from 2004 and led to a new branch of science in multifunctional materials.    

Doolittle currently leads a third MURI program aimed at building nanoscale devices that operate in a way that is similar to various brain functions. His MURI team’s goal is to develop an artificial retina that can learn autonomously and be used for advanced image recognition cameras for national defense and police work. He is a co-PI on a fourth MURI, led by Samuel Graham, the Eugene C. Gwaltney Chair and Professor of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. This program examines the nanoscale engineering of thermal interfaces, so as to improve heat dissipation in power electronics.

Over the years, Doolittle and his colleagues have raised approximately $38 million in research funding from multiple government agencies and industry. He has published 157 refereed journal and conference papers, and he has been issued nine patents. For his hard work and dedication to research, Doolittle was recognized with the Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award in 2008, the 2002-2003 Student Government Faculty of the Year Award, and the 2005 ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award.

An excellent classroom teacher, Doolittle earns teaching ratings from undergraduate and graduate students that consistently exceed the School’s norms. He has taught 1,009 undergraduates and 178 graduate students with teaching effectiveness ratings of 4.7 out of 5 in courses such as Microelectronics Circuits, Semiconductor Devices, Renewable Energy Devices, and Introduction to Microelectronic Technology. 

Doolittle is a two-time recipient of the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, an honor determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, in 2003 and 2011. He also received the 2006 Georgia Tech W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award and the 2005 Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Over the years, he has made his lab available for campus and ECE outreach tours and has advised high school teachers through various programs.           

Doolittle has long been internationally recognized as a leader in his field. He has chaired the two biggest conferences in his area of expertise, the International Workshop on Nitride Semiconductors and the International Conference on Nitride Semiconductors, and he has also been chair and program chair for these and other semiconductor conferences several times.

Ougazzaden is the director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GTL) and a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He was specifically recognized for his achievements in semiconductor science and technology during his 29-year-long career. 

Metz mayor, Dominique Gros, pinned the medal on behalf of French President Emmanuel Macron, while Ougazzaden was surrounded by family and friends; eminent colleagues in science, research, and innovation; students; and dignitaries from around the world. An important delegation came from his native Morocco to join in celebrating this well-deserved honor.

Never satisfied with the status quo, Ougazzaden shared memories of a childhood in Casablanca, Morocco that instilled in him a lifelong curiosity and love of science. With a trajectory that has taken him all over the world, from Morocco to France, to the United States and then back to France again, Ougazzaden has long been a sought-after researcher and academic.

Ougazzaden’s specific areas of expertise cover the fields of materials, photonics, and optoelectronics, and he has published over 450 papers and has generated 26 patents in these areas. He began his career with CNET (Centre National d’Etudes de Télécommunications) and France Télécom, where he worked on the development of fiber optics. Ougazzaden then came to the United States, where he spent four years working at Lucent, Agere Systems, and Triquint Semiconductor. In 2003, he returned to France and became a professor at the University of Metz.

In 2005, Ougazzaden joined the Georgia Tech School of ECE as a professor based at the GTL campus in Metz, France. He worked with the CNRS (the French National Center for Science) and Georgia Tech to establish France’s first International Joint Research Laboratory, GT-CNRS UMI 2958. The lab is located at GTL, and he served as its director from 2006-2018.

Ougazzaden currently serves as the director of GTL and is the co-founder and co-president of Institut Lafayette, an innovation platform that provides access to world-class facilities and expertise in advanced semiconductor materials/devices research and prototyping for innovations in optoelectronics. Institut Lafayette also offers technology transfer services that accelerate and increase the efficiency of commercialization of these innovations.

Mayor Gros thanked Ougazzaden for his cross-cultural contributions amongst Morocco, France, and the United States and for maintaining an international dialogue in academics, research, and innovation. “For every speech, there needs to be a spark or conductive wire, especially when we are honoring a semiconductor specialist,” quipped Mayor Gros in an article published by La Semaine de Metz. “That spark is that you [Ougazzaden] have never stopped contributing to the dialogue. This dialogue between professional worlds must be unraveled between the world of research and the needs of industry.”

Additional credits: Andrea Gappell, assistance with French to English translations with portions of the article; Arnaud Hussenot, photography.

Razi Dehghannasiri’s thesis is entitled "Hypersonic phononic crystal structures for integrated nano-electromechanical/optomechanical devices.” Integrated phononic devices fabricated on silicon chips are of great interest for diverse scientific and industrial applications. Dehghannasiri’sdissertation presents the study of such integrated phononic devices in new CMOS-compatible platforms in the form of phononic crystal (PnC) structures (i.e., periodic structures supporting phononic bandgaps). These phononic structures have a higher efficiency and lower phononic/photonic losses. 

In particular, this dissertation presents the experimental study of the developed hypersonic pillar-based PnC platform with wideband surface phononic bandgaps on AlN-on-Si substrates for wireless communications. In addition, this dissertation includes the study of membrane PnC structures in silicon nitride for efficient stimulated Brillouin scattering in structures compatible with integrated optics platforms for on-chip RF-photonics. Advised by ECE Joseph M. Pettit Professor Ali Adibi, Dehghannasirigraduated last spring and is now a silicon photonics integration engineer with Intel Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Sean Rodrigues’ thesis is entitled "Instigating chiral-selective nonlinear optical phenomena in metamaterials.” Photonic metamaterials, engineered materials composed of building blocks smaller than the wavelength of light, provide a unique approach to create optical elements that are only 10’s of nanometers thick. 

In Rodrigues’ thesis, the Cai Lab introduces handed asymmetry into these nanostructures, in order to achieve strong polarization and nonlinear optical effects. The resulting research has impacts within the nanophotonics community that may result in photonic equipment for polarization and light management systems in augmented reality, LiDAR technologies, tamper proofing, and chiral sensing. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai, Rodrigues graduated last summer and is now a senior scientist with Toyota Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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

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

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

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

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

1. What sparked your interest in engineering and what problems are you hoping to help solve as an engineer?

Although my father is a pilot, and studied aerospace engineering, I did not consider engineering until the summer before my senior year of high school. I was decent in math and physics classes and absolutely loved chemistry, so the more I looked into different STEM majors, the more appealing engineering became. I’m really passionate about improving the health of the planet, and I am hoping to be able to work on improving energy production and battery storage technology, or even designing materials to be more reusable and recyclable. This research is integral to the broad collective effort necessary for the future of environmentally sustainable design.

2. What research are you conducting at GT and what applications do you feel this research may have?

I’m studying the use of 2D materials as corrosive barriers. More specifically, my project is focused on how graphene quality affects its ability to protect copper against corrosion by inducing defects in large grain, non-defective graphene.  This research has the potential to better protect microelectronic devices from corrosion that can lead to damage or failure of the device. With thinner corrosion barriers, electronics for use in hostile environments (exposure to radiation, extreme temperatures, weathering, etc.) can be scaled down in footprint whilst still being protected.

3. What has been your favorite lab activity/ tool training/ etc. thus far and why?

I have really enjoyed using the scanning electron microscopes in the Materials Characterization Facility. This tool essentially allows me to take pictures of my samples under extremely high magnification. The resolution is amazing.

4. Do you feel this REU experience has helped prepare you for working in a collaborative laboratory environment and furthered your education goals?

Without a doubt.  Through this REU I was lucky enough to be placed in an amazing lab group and work under an excellent mentor, Katie Young.  I am getting exposure to more technology, techniques, and ideas that I could have ever anticipated. One of the most beneficial things was having access to so many individuals that are pursuing different careers in in materials science and engineering and getting input advice on my own educational path.

5. What are your plans post-undergraduate?

As of now, my only definitive plan is to obtain my undergraduate degree in materials science and engineering. Whether I pursue a master’s or doctorate, and if I will enter industry or remain in academia will be decided once I get through more of my undergraduate classes and gain more experience. Long term, I do like the idea of a career in R&D research at NASA or JPL.

6. What is your favorite thing about/impression of GA Tech and ATL?

I love how many trees the campus has! I was really nervous about spending the summer in a big city because I am used to spending the summer hiking and working in a farm environment, but all of the greenspace has helped me miss home little less. It was also fantastic to be around so many people following the same career path as myself, and get exposed to different possibilities within my field.

The SENIC REU program is funded by NSF award EEC-1757579.

"We are so fortunate to work with a leading engineering school like Georgia Tech to find innovative, potentially life-saving treatment options for our patients,” said Donna Hyland, president and CEO, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “This is a great example of how aligning Children’s clinical expertise with the missions of our research collaborators can improve patient outcomes. Research that can be translated into more effective care at the bedside is why our collaboration with Georgia Tech is so important for the future of pediatric care in Georgia.”

The patient who received the groundbreaking surgery is a 7-month-old boy battling both congenital heart disease and tracheo-bronchomalacia, a condition that causes severe life-threatening airway obstruction. During his six-month inpatient stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Children’s, he experienced frequent episodes of airway collapse that could not be corrected by typical surgery protocols. The clinical team proposed surgically inserting an experimental 3D-printed tracheal splint, which is a novel device still in development, to open his airways and expand the trachea and bronchus. 

Scott Hollister, Ph.D., who holds the Patsy and Alan Dorris Endowed Chair in Pediatric Technology, a joint initiative supported by Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, developed the process for creating the tracheal splint using 3D printing technology at University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital prior to joining Georgia Tech. The Children’s procedure was the 15th time a 3D-printed tracheal splint was placed in a pediatric patient. 

“The possibility of using 3D printing technology to save the life of a child is our motivation in the lab every day,” said Hollister, who is also the director of the Center for 3D Medical Fabrication at Georgia Tech and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We’re determined to develop innovative solutions that meet the needs of Georgia’s most complex pediatric patients.”

The splints were created using reconstructions of the patient’s airways from CT scans. Hollister and his team of biomedical engineers collaborated with the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI) so that GCMI could create multiple versions of the splint, of varying sizes, to ensure the perfect fit was available for the surgical team to select and place around the patient’s airways during surgery. GCMI will also support the ongoing development and commercialization of the technology.

In a complex 10-hour surgery, Children’s cross-functional team of surgeons successfully placed three 3D-printed splints around the patient’s trachea on the morning of August 17, 2018. The splints will eventually be absorbed into the body, allowing for expansion of the trachea and bronchus. 

The Children’s tracheal splint team included Steve Goudy, M.D., and April Landry, M.D., (ENT), pediatric otolaryngologists; Subhadra Shashidharan, M.D., pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon; and Kevin Maher, M.D., pediatric cardiologist. 

As the tracheal procedure concluded, the child was placed on a heart lung machine for surgical repair of his cardiac defect. Postoperative care took place in the Cardiac ICU and the Pediatric ICU at Children’s.

“It’s the close relationships we have with our research collaborators that make this kind of groundbreaking procedure possible,” said Dr. Goudy. “A large number of additional physicians, support staff and outside collaborators worked together on this innovative procedure.”

The 3D-printed tracheal splint is a new device still under development, as safety and effectiveness have not yet been determined and is therefore not available for clinical use. The Children’s team sought emergency clearance from the FDA to move forward with the procedure under expanded access guidelines.

In 2015, Georgia Tech and Children’s formed The Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center on Georgia Tech's campus to further advance pediatric research.

Media Contacts: Chrissie Gallentine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (404-785-7614) or John Toon, Georgia Institute of Technology (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta 
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has been 100 percent dedicated to kids for more than 100 years. A not- for-profit organization, Children’s is dedicated to making kids better today and healthier tomorrow. Our specialized care helps children get better faster and live healthier lives. Managing more than a million patient visits annually at three hospitals, Marcus Autism Center, and 27 neighborhood locations, Children’s is the largest healthcare provider for children in Georgia and one of the largest pediatric clinical care providers in the country. Children’s offers access to more than 60 pediatric specialties and programs and is ranked among the top children’s hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report.  With generous philanthropic and volunteer support since 1915, Children’s has impacted the lives of children in Georgia, the United States and throughout the world. Visit www.choa.org for more information.

Over the next months, IEN will be highlighting the undergraduate participants, their research topics and experience in the labs, as well as what they gained from the program and their time at Georgia Tech, and in Atlanta.

Our first interviewee from the program is Alton O'Neal, an undergraduate in Engineering at Clemson University.

1. What sparked your interest in engineering and what problems are you hoping to help solve as an engineer?

My interest in engineering developed out of a love of science and math combined with a love of hands-on work and being able to see something function that I built. As an undergraduate I have interned at Clemson’s Maker Space, which gave me a feel for the technical/non-research side on engineering, as well as an industry internship researching carbide synthesis for additive manufacturing, which gave me a researcher’s view of laboratory engineering.  I love solving problems, no matter what the field.

2. What research are you conducting at GT and what applications do you feel this research may have?

I have participating in research on micro-preconcentrators for gas sensors. These sensors have a thin film layer of carbon nanotubes deposited on them which can absorb a target gas for sensing. The sensors’ electrical signal output is altered when the target gas is detected. These pre-loaded detectors have the possibility to lower the threshold at which dangerous gases may be detected, as well as miniaturize the sensor for in-field deployment. These kinds of sensors may be used in a variety of applications, such as medical testing, environmental assessments and agricultural studies.

3. What has been your favorite lab activity/ tool training/ etc. thus far and why?

I really enjoyed the micromachining and nanomanufacturing tools available in the cleanrooms, and getting the chance to learn some of the techniques used in the processes for making our lab’s sensors. Through the cleanroom experience, I was able to see the stacked building blocks of materials and processes that go into making nanoscale devices.

4. Do you feel this REU experience has helped prepare you for working in a collaborative laboratory environment and furthered your education goals?

Absolutely. The high intensity of the work was, at first, a bit of a shock, but because of this focus, I feel I was able to dedicate more time to the project and achieve more results. Additionally, I really appreciated being in a collaborative environment in which I was able, not only to learn from my mentor, team members, and laboratory PI, but also able to contribute.

5. What are your plans post-undergraduate?

I plan on entering industry, as a process engineer, or in R&D, so I will continue to study until I have gained my M.S. degree in either Chemical or Materials Engineering.

6. What is your favorite thing about/impression of GA Tech and ATL?

I have enjoyed being so close to downtown Atlanta without feeling like I am in a completely urban environment. The green-space of the campus, distribution of the campus building, and all of the activities and attractions nearby make the city less intimidating to newcomers.

The award is intended for specific contributions such as commercial products, software or hardware systems, or specific algorithms or tools incorporated into other systems widely used by industry and academia. The impact is measured by commercialization and wide adoption of the nominee’s contributions.

Raychowdhury won the award for his contributions to "integrated DSL modems, always-on and intelligent sensor hardware and model development for non-linear control in voltage regulators.”

Prior to attending graduate school, Raychowdhury first worked as an analog researcher at Texas Instruments (TI) for two years, where he designed the world's first adaptive mixed-signal echo-canceller for the receive-channel in ADSL modems. It used a hardware based optimizer for impedance matching and resulted in 1.5X range improvement. Raychowdhury holds two key patents in this area, and the design eventually was adopted by three generations of TI modems and was awarded the EDN design of the year award.

After receiving his Ph.D., Raychowdhury joined Intel Labs as a research scientist where he led the design of "always-on" smart microphones, which led to a design win with BMW and led to the adoption of the technology in automotive infotainment systems. This was the industry's first hardware design that incorporated an ultra-low power microphone-sensor front-end with a fully-programmable keyword-spotting hardware.

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2013, Raychowdhury has been exploring various aspects of power-efficient design. Most notably, his students and he contributed to the development of switched-mode and non-linear control in high-bandwidth all-digital, linear regulators that have gained wide traction with the semiconductor companies. The design principles have been adopted in internal test-chips and system prototypes at Qualcomm and Intel.

Raychowdhury was nominated for this IEEE/ACM award by researchers and engineers from Qualcomm, TI, TSMC, and Intel with support from Georgia Tech and the University of California, Berkeley.

Su is a May 2018 Ph.D. graduate of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and now works at Google as a hardware engineer. She joined the ATHENA Lab in fall 2013, where she was advised by Manos Tentzeris, who holds the Ken Byers Professorship in Flexible Electronics. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in summer 2013 and her master's in ECE at Georgia Tech in May 2015.

Su's Ph.D. research focuses on interface advanced novel fabrication techniques such as inkjet-printing and 3D printing, and special mechanical structures such as microfluidics and origami. She also works on high-performance microwave components/antennas to solve existing problems and extend to applications in smart health, wearable electronics in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Su specifically focuses on designing novel reconfigurable antennas/microwave passives components using dielectric liquid, as well as liquid metal alloy, and building liquid sensors/sensing platforms for easier communication and better sensing.

A potential strategy to overcome this barrier is to introduce new materials into the transistor structure to enhance their performance and functionalities. And that is the playground of Professor Asif Khan’s group of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “One of the interesting classes of functional materials that we are working on is called antiferroelectric oxides, which could lead to efficient, nanoscale logic and memory devices and devices which can even mimic the functions of biological neurons and synapses,” says Khan. In their recent work published as an Editor’s Pick in the May issue of Applied Physics Letters, they show how these mystery materials—antiferroelectrics—can be fine-tuned by doping, and how their processing techniques can be simplified to ease their entry into conventional micro- and nano-electronic fabrication technologies.

Antiferroelectric materials are electrical insulating in a way very similar to the dielectric materials used in regular capacitors. However, the significant difference is that when a certain voltage is applied across it, it undergoes a phase transition into another  insulating state which is structurally different than the parent one. With appropriate nano-scale engineering, this phenomenon can be the basis for high performance logic transistors and disruptive memory technologies. Interestingly, antiferroelectricity was discovered more than 60 years ago in perovskite materials—yet it did not have a significant impact on the electronics industry despite the attractiveness because perovskites are not compatible with currently used CMOS fabrication processes. What makes the Khan group’s work particularly relevant for transistor applications is that they are studying this phenomenon in Zirconia--a very well-studied non-perovskite binary oxide which has already been in use for more than a decade in the semiconductor industry.

The major contribution of the recent work by Khan’s group is that they significantly simplified the complex process flow of stabilizing the antiferroelectric phase of zirconia. Typically, a metallic capping layer and a high temperature annealing step is required to convert dielectric zirconia into an antiferroelectric state. The group were able to eliminate these process steps through a thoughtful design process of the material stack. Khan is hopeful that this will reduce the barrier to entry of antiferroelectrics into the state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing processes for novel device applications. Furthermore, by introducing small amounts of lanthanum into zirconia, the researchers were able to tune the properties of antiferroelectric zirconia, namely critical field/voltage for phase transition, dielectric constant and polarization. “Such tunability can not only enable a large design space for nanoelectronic antiferroelectric devices, but also be useful for their traditional applications of antiferroelectrics in electro-calories, pyroelectrics and micro-actuators,” says Khan. He also mentions that antiferroelectricity is a close cousin of a well-known phenomenon—ferroelectricity, which being researched and adopted by major semiconductor manufacturers for potential memory applications. His previous work also focused on ferroelectric oxides for ultra-low power negative capacitance transistors. However, as he points out, antiferroelectric oxides can do all that ferroelectric oxides can but with much better endurance and reliability and reduced process complexity.

Khan’s group actively collaborated with their industry partner, Eugenus, Inc. located in San Jose, CA. “Our industry-academia partnership is vital for bringing new ideas into the fore-fronts of technology,” says Dr. Mukherjee of Eugenus, Inc., also a co-author of the paper.  “We look forward to further collaboration to assess the applicability and the potential of new material and device concepts.” The Khan group also collaborated with the Charles University at Prague, Czech Republic, on structural characterization of the antiferroelectric zirconia films.

- Christa M. Ernst

“Antiferroelectricity in lanthanum doped zirconia without metallic capping layers and post-deposition/-metallization anneals” is an Editor’s Pick in May’s Applied Physics Letters. You can view the article here. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5037185

Khan’s work at Georgia Tech is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Over the course of five years, this grant program has seeded forty-five projects with forty-nine students working in ten different schools in COE and COS, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 2 external projects.

The 4 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six-month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, energy production, and microelectronics packaging applications.

The Spring 2018 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Jiang Chen (PI Ben Wang - MSE): Validation and Characterization of Living Cell Grafting on Polycaprolactone Fibers for Textile Tissue Engineering
• Fatima Chrit (PI Alexander Alexeev - ME): Microfluidic Adhesion-based Sorting of Biological Cells
• Zifei Sun (PI Gleb Yushin - MSE): FeOx Coated FeF3-C Nanofibers as Free-standing Cathodes for Sodium- Ion Batteries
• Ting Wang (PI Xing Xie - Civil and Environmental Engineering): Development of Lab-on-a-Chip Devices for the Mechanisms Study of Cell Transportation and Bacteria Inactivation in a Non-Uniform Electric Field

Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2019.

Yalamanchili is the recipient of the W. Marshall Leach, Jr./Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award. A member of the ECE faculty since 1989, he is currently a Regents’ Professor and holds the Joseph M. Pettit Chair Professorship. “I can think of no greater reward in the faculty's roles as educators than the recognition of our students,” he said. “I am honored to receive this award with all that it represents.” 

Yalamanchili teaches the undergraduate courses, ECE 2020 Fundamentals of Digital Design and ECE 3056 Architecture, Concurrency, and Energy, as well as graduate courses in Advanced Computer Architecture. His classroom goal has been to prepare students for technology advances that will take place in their lifetimes that will produce transformational shifts in computer architecture and will be accompanied by emerging application demands producing dramatic increase in capabilities. 

Yalamanchili has sought to emphasize the timeless principles of computation and information, while separating engineering processes that transform this knowledge into efficient software and hardware computing artifacts. Students will be better equipped to apply these principles across these technology shifts and serve as shepherds and leaders of this technology revolution.

A member of the ECE faculty since 2009 and currently an associate professor, Bloch received the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award. “This award was unexpected,” he said. “I am truly honored to receive this recognition from our students.”

Bloch was first based at the Georgia Tech-Lorraine campus in Metz, France, and then moved to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta in 2013. He teaches the undergraduate courses, ECE 3084 Signals and Systems and ECE 4607 Mobile and Wireless Networks, as well as graduate courses in Random Processes, Information Theory, and Coding Theory and Applications. 

While maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism when approaching the latest trends in education, Bloch has been actively experimenting with blended learning approaches for the past two years. A 2012 Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow and 2017 Hesburgh Award Teaching Fellow, he believes in engaging students through problem solving and in emphasizing the mastery of fundamentals. Over the past years, Bloch has borrowed teaching ideas and techniques from diverse sources, ranging from his colleagues within and outside of ECE to his experiences as a martial arts instructor.

All three students have been invited to submit to a competition to select the overall campus recipients for CTL's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award, Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.   

Omojaro is ECE’s nominee for CTL’s Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award. He is being recognized for his work as an undergraduate TA for ECE 2035 Programming Hardware/Software Systems, taught by ECE Associate Professor Linda M. Wills. Omojaro is a senior majoring in computer engineering.

Unluturk is ECE’s nominee for CTL’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. She is being recognized for her work as a graduate student instructor for ECE 3710 Circuits and Electronics; these sections are led by ECE Academic Professional Joyelle Harris. Unluturk is a Ph.D. student who works in the Broadband and Wireless Networking Lab and is advised by Ian F. Akyildiz, the Ken Byers Professor in Telecommunications.

Liang is ECE’s nominee for CTL’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. He is being recognized for his work as a graduate teaching assistant for ECE 3084 Signals and Systems, taught by ECE Associate Professor Matthieu Bloch. He is also being recognized for CETL 8000 Graduate Teaching Assistant Preparation; these sections are led by ECE Academic Professional Daniela Staiculescu. Liang is a Ph.D. student who works in the Communications Assurance and Performance Group; he is advised by Raheem A. Beyah, the Interim Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Motorola Foundation Professor.

Omojaro, Unluturk, and Liang will all be recognized at CTL’s TA and Future Faculty Awards Day to be held on April 17 from 4-6 pm at the Student Success Center. At this event, all of the school level nominees will be recognized and the names of the three campus wide award winners will be announced for CTL’s Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award, Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Desai is being recognized “for contributions to medical and swarm robotics.” A BME faculty member since 2016, he also serves as associate director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and as director of the newly launched Georgia Center for Medical Robotics. Desai’s research interests are primarily in image-guided surgical robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. Before joining Georgia Tech, Desai was a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Mukhopadhyay is being recognized “for contributions to energy-efficient and robust computing systems design.” An ECE faculty member since 2007, he leads the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab, where he and his current team of 12 Ph.D. students develop smart machines that are able to generate usable information from real-time data for diverse applications - from self-powered sensors to mobile phones to high-performance servers. Mukhopadhyay’s team explores algorithmic principles to make these systems energy-efficient, robust, and secure, and pursue their experimental demonstration in silicon. 

Romberg is being recognized “for contributions to compressive sensing.” An ECE faculty member since 2006, he is the School’s associate chair for Research and holds the Schlumberger Professorship. In addition, Romberg serves as associate director for the Center for Machine Learning. He conducts research that is on the interface between signal processing, applied harmonic analysis, and optimization. Romberg and his current team of six Ph.D. students are interested in both the mathematical theory and real-world implementation of algorithms to make difficult processing tasks much easier.

Sangston is being recognized “for contributions to coherent detection of radar signals in clutter.” He initially came to GTRI from the U.S Naval Research Laboratory in 1996. His research in target detection in difficult clutter environments from the mid-1990s up till the present time has been a fruitful source of ideas and motivation for many investigators pursuing advanced research on radar target detection problems throughout the world. He currently works in the Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory (SEAL), where he conducts research that seeks to combine advanced geometric and algebraic ideas to solve challenging radar signal processing problems. 

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000-plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power, and consumer electronics.

Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 1,300 active industry standards.  The association also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 1,700 international technical conferences each year.  To learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit www.ieee.org.

“I’m looking forward to continuing the upward trajectory of our graduate research and education program here in ECE at Georgia Tech,” Klein said. “In particular, we will aggressively recruit a diverse group of the top graduate school applicants to join our program.”

Klein received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994, 1995, and 2000, respectively. From 2000-2003, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, working on semiconductor quantum dot-based devices. 

Klein first joined Georgia Tech as an ECE faculty member based at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus in 2003, and in 2012, he transferred to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. His research involves the theory, modeling, and design of semiconductor optoelectronic devices, including vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, LEDs, scintillator neutron detectors, and solar cells. This work has been funded by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Commerce, and by industry sponsors, including Canon, Inc.

Klein has served on the program committees for the Optics in the Southeast Conference and the Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices (NUSOD) Conference, which he co-hosted in 2010. He has served as the chair of the Optics and Photonics Technical Interest Group in the School of ECE since 2011.

Klein has written an online textbook titled Laser Photonics for use in ECE 4751–Laser Theory and Applications. In 2010, he received the Georgia Tech Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award. Since 2016, he has been heavily involved in academic assessment activities for ABET and SACS accreditation, and he is a past member of the Institute’s Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.   

While at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus, Klein was the faculty advisor of the IEEE student branch. Since coming to Atlanta, he has been involved in community outreach to elementary and middle school teachers in the Gwinnett County School System through a CEISMC program, and he has been involved in ECE's H.O.T. Days summer program with local high school students. Finally, Klein has a lovely singing voice, which he occasionally showcases at local karaoke establishments.

With billions of connected devices, and several more billions to come in the next few years, the opportunities are endless.  With such a dramatic growth, the devices need to be low-cost, preferably self-powered, low power-consuming, wirelessly connectible, reliable, mass producible, customizable, easily accessible and usable, lightweight, and also be able to conform to the surface of the object to which they are attached.  This conformality then drives the need for flexible electronics, changing the world of electronics from one of being flat and stiff to one which is bendable and stretchable. This paradigm shift in electronics, driven by the shape of things-to come drives the need for Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE).

With these grand challenges in mind, Prof. Suresh Sitaraman from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) , Georgia Tech hosted, in conjunction with NextFlex, the Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute, a workshop that focused on expert presentations of state-of-the-art, along with the  defining a technical roadmap targeting on the power aspects of FHE device, called “Powering the Internet of Everything”.

The workshop, attended by nearly 90 Government, Industry, and Academic experts was held in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building on November 6 – 8, 2017. The three-day event included invited talks, roadmapping, a student technical poster session, and guided tours of principal research and shared user laboratories where FHE related research, micro/nano fabrication and microanalysis occur on the GT campus. Labs visited included mechanical and electrical testing, modeling and characterization; additive and 3D printing; device packaging; soft robotics and exoskeleton; organic photonics and electronics; and the IEN micro/nano fabrication and microscopy laboratories, to name a few. Workshop attendees were able to get up a close up view to the interesting FHE projects in which students and faculty are engaged. At each stop in the tour students demonstrated their work and answered questions about their programs, from flexible batteries for IOT to robotic human augmentation exoskeletons, FHE-enabled wearables and human-machine interfaces, and more.  Of greatest interest to the participants were those technologies that had already been demonstrated in the GT labs and which are ready for prototyping and pilot scale manufacturing.

Technical sessions included; Power and Energy Systems Needs, Energy Harvesting Strategies, Energy Storage Strategies, Power Management Strategies, and Ultra-Low Power Electronics/Sensors. Speakers were drawn from both government and private sectors, as well as academia. Speakers included participation from AT&T, IBM, NIH, Naval Surface Warfare Center, the Office of Naval Research, PARC, Silniva, Air Force Research Lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Blue Spark Technologies, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Following the technical sessions, the Marcus Nanotechnology Building Atrium space filled to capacity for an evening reception and competitive student poster and demo session. With over 35 FHE projects on display, the judging team consisting of industry and government experts was challenged with determining the best posters based on the content, clarity and organization, and overall presentation. After the scores were tallied, it was announced that there was a three-way tie for first place, a second place winner, and a tie for third, with all of them winning monetary awards.

Below is a list of the winning poster titles and authors:

Tied for 1^st

“Toward all-soft and fully-integrated microsystems: vertically integrated physical and chemical microsystems using gallium-based liquid metal and soft lithography”, Min-gu Kim and Prof. Oliver Brand

“Novel Architectures for Polymer Thermoelectric Devices for Energy Harvesting”, Akanksha Menon, Kiarash Gordiz, and Prof. Shannon Yee

“Soft, Fluidic Modulation of Skin Temperature”, Donald J. Ward, Nil Z. Gurel, Prof. Omer T. Inan, and Frank L. Hammond

2^nd Place

“Self-powered Wide-frequency Flexible Triboelectric (SWIFT) Microphone”, N. Arora, S. L. Zhang, M. Gupta, F. Shahmiri, D. Osorio, Y. Wang, Z. Wang, C. Zhang, T. Starner, B. Boots, ZL Wang, G. D. Abowd

Tied for 3^rd

“Mm-wave Ultra-Long-Range Energy-Autonomous Printed RFID      Van-Atta Wireless Gas Sensors: at the Crossroads of 5G and IoT”, Jimmy Hester and Prof. Manos Tentzeris

“Sensorized Pneumatic Muscles for Force and Stiffness Control”, Lucas O. Tiziani, Thomas W. Cahoon, and Frank L. Hammond III

About FHE at Georgia Tech:
Led by Prof. Suresh Sitaraman, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, more than 30  researchers at Georgia Tech are involved in projects involving flexible electronics from the School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Several interdisciplinary research institutes at Georgia Tech are also involved in the projects, including the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and the Institute for Materials.  The Office of Industry Collaboration and the College of Engineering are also actively engaged.

About NextFlex:
Formed in 2015 through a cooperative agreement between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and FlexTech Alliance, NextFlex is a consortium of companies, academic institutions, non-profits and state, local and federal governments with a shared goal of advancing U.S. Manufacturing of FHE. By adding electronics to new and unique materials that are part of our everyday lives in conjunction with the power of silicon ICs to create conformable and stretchable smart products, FHE is ushering in an era of “electronics on everything” and advancing the efficiency of our world.

- Christa M. Ernst
  {christa.ernst@ien.gatech.edu}

Transferring the gallium nitride sensors to metallic foils and flexible polymers doubles their sensitivity to nitrogen dioxide gas, and boosts response time by a factor of six. The simple production steps, based on metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), could also lower the cost of producing the sensors and other optoelectronic devices.

Sensors produced with the new process can detect ammonia at parts-per-billion levels and differentiate between nitrogen-containing gases. The gas sensor fabrication technique was reported November 9 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Mechanically, we just peel the devices off the substrate, like peeling the layers of an onion,” explained Abdallah Ougazzaden, director of Georgia Tech Lorraine in Metz, France and a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “We can put the layer on another support that could be flexible, metallic or plastic. This technique really opens up a lot of opportunity for new functionality, new devices – and commercializing them.”

The researchers begin the process by growing monolayers of boron nitride on two-inch sapphire wafers using an MOVPE process at approximately 1,300 degrees Celsius. The boron nitride surface coating is only a few nanometers thick, and produces crystalline structures that have strong planar surface connections, but weak vertical connections.

Aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN/GaN) devices are then grown atop the monolayers at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Celsius, also using an MOVPE process. Because of the boron nitride crystalline properties, the devices are attached to the substrate only by weak Van der Waals forces, which can be overcome mechanically. The devices can be transferred to other substrates without inducing cracks or other defects. The sapphire wafers can be reused for additional device growth.

“This approach for engineering GaN-based sensors is a key step in the pathway towards economically viable, flexible sensors with improved performances that could be integrated into wearable applications,” the authors wrote in their paper.

So far, the researchers have transferred the sensors to copper foil, aluminum foil and polymeric materials. In operation, the devices can differentiate between nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ammonia. Because the devices are approximately 100 by 100 microns, sensors for multiple gases can be produced on a single integrated device. 

“Not only can we differentiate between these gases, but because the sensor is very small, we can detect them all at the same time with an array of sensors,” said Ougazzaden, who expects that the devices could be modified to also detect ozone, carbon dioxide and other gases.

The gallium nitride sensors could have a wide range of applications from industry to vehicle engines – and for wearable sensing devices. The devices are attractive because of their advantageous materials properties, which include high thermal and chemical stability.

“The devices are small and flexible, which will allow us to put them onto many different types of support,” said Ougazzaden, who also directs the International Joint Research Lab at Georgia Tech CNRS.

To assess the effects of transferring the devices to a different substrate, the researchers measured device performance on the original sapphire wafer and compared that to performance on the new metallic and polymer substrates. They were surprised to see a doubling of the sensor sensitivity and a six-fold increase in response time, changes beyond what could be expected by a simple thermal change in the devices.

“Not only can we have flexibility in the substrate, but we can also improve the performance of the devices just by moving them to a different support with appropriate properties,” he said. “Properties of the substrate alone makes the different in the performance.”

In future work, the researchers hope to boost the quality of the devices and demonstrate other sensing applications. “One of the challenges ahead is to improve the quality of the materials so we can extend this to other applications that are very sensitive to the substrates, such as high-performance electronics.”

The Georgia Tech researchers have previously used a similar technique to produce light-emitting diodes and ultraviolet detectors that were transferred to different substrates, and they believe the process could also be used to produce high-power electronics. For those applications, transferring the devices from sapphire to substrates with better thermal conductivity could provide a significant advantage in device operation.

Ougazzaden and his research team have been working on boron-based semiconductors since 2005. Their work has attracted visits from several industrial companies interested in exploring the technology, he said.

“I am very excited and lucky to work on such hot topic and top-notch technology at GT-Lorraine,” said Taha Ayari, a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of ECE and the paper’s first author.

In addition to Ougazzaden, the research team includes Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Taha Ayari, Matthew Jordan, Xin Li and Saiful Alam; Chris Bishop and Youssef ElGmili, researchers at Institut Lafayette; Suresh Sundaram, a researcher at Georgia Tech Lorraine; Gilles Patriarche, a researcher at the Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies (C2N) at CNRS; Paul Voss, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of ECE; and Jean Paul Salvestrini, a professor at Georgia Tech Lorraine and adjunct professor in the Georgia Tech School of ECE.

The research was supported by ANR (Agence Nationale de Recherche), the National Agency of Research in France through the “GANEX” Project.

CITATION: Taha Ayari, et al., “Gas sensors boosted by two-dimensional h-BN enabled transfer on thin substrate foils: towards wearable and portable applications,” (Scientific Reports, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15065-6

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Transferring the gallium nitride sensors to metallic foils and flexible polymers doubles their sensitivity to nitrogen dioxide gas, and boosts response time by a factor of six. The simple production steps, based on metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), could also lower the cost of producing the sensors and other optoelectronic devices.

Sensors produced with the new process can detect ammonia at parts-per-billion levels and differentiate between nitrogen-containing gases. The gas sensor fabrication technique was reported November 9 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Mechanically, we just peel the devices off the substrate, like peeling the layers of an onion,” explained Abdallah Ougazzaden, director of Georgia Tech Lorraine in Metz, France and a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “We can put the layer on another support that could be flexible, metallic or plastic. This technique really opens up a lot of opportunity for new functionality, new devices – and commercializing them.”

The researchers begin the process by growing monolayers of boron nitride on two-inch sapphire wafers using an MOVPE process at approximately 1,300 degrees Celsius. The boron nitride surface coating is only a few nanometers thick, and produces crystalline structures that have strong planar surface connections, but weak vertical connections.

Aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN/GaN) devices are then grown atop the monolayers at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Celsius, also using an MOVPE process. Because of the boron nitride crystalline properties, the devices are attached to the substrate only by weak Van der Waals forces, which can be overcome mechanically. The devices can be transferred to other substrates without inducing cracks or other defects. The sapphire wafers can be reused for additional device growth.

“This approach for engineering GaN-based sensors is a key step in the pathway towards economically viable, flexible sensors with improved performances that could be integrated into wearable applications,” the authors wrote in their paper.

So far, the researchers have transferred the sensors to copper foil, aluminum foil and polymeric materials. In operation, the devices can differentiate between nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ammonia. Because the devices are approximately 100 by 100 microns, sensors for multiple gases can be produced on a single integrated device. 

“Not only can we differentiate between these gases, but because the sensor is very small, we can detect them all at the same time with an array of sensors,” said Ougazzaden, who expects that the devices could be modified to also detect ozone, carbon dioxide and other gases.

The gallium nitride sensors could have a wide range of applications from industry to vehicle engines – and for wearable sensing devices. The devices are attractive because of their advantageous materials properties, which include high thermal and chemical stability.

“The devices are small and flexible, which will allow us to put them onto many different types of support,” said Ougazzaden, who also directs the International Joint Research Lab at Georgia Tech CNRS.

To assess the effects of transferring the devices to a different substrate, the researchers measured device performance on the original sapphire wafer and compared that to performance on the new metallic and polymer substrates. They were surprised to see a doubling of the sensor sensitivity and a six-fold increase in response time, changes beyond what could be expected by a simple thermal change in the devices.

“Not only can we have flexibility in the substrate, but we can also improve the performance of the devices just by moving them to a different support with appropriate properties,” he said. “Properties of the substrate alone makes the different in the performance.”

In future work, the researchers hope to boost the quality of the devices and demonstrate other sensing applications. “One of the challenges ahead is to improve the quality of the materials so we can extend this to other applications that are very sensitive to the substrates, such as high-performance electronics.”

The Georgia Tech researchers have previously used a similar technique to produce light-emitting diodes and ultraviolet detectors that were transferred to different substrates, and they believe the process could also be used to produce high-power electronics. For those applications, transferring the devices from sapphire to substrates with better thermal conductivity could provide a significant advantage in device operation.

Ougazzaden and his research team have been working on boron-based semiconductors since 2005. Their work has attracted visits from several industrial companies interested in exploring the technology, he said.

“I am very excited and lucky to work on such hot topic and top-notch technology at GT-Lorraine,” said Taha Ayari, a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of ECE and the paper’s first author.

In addition to Ougazzaden, the research team includes Georgia Tech Ph.D. students Taha Ayari, Matthew Jordan, Xin Li and Saiful Alam; Chris Bishop and Youssef ElGmili, researchers at Institut Lafayette; Suresh Sundaram, a researcher at Georgia Tech Lorraine; Gilles Patriarche, a researcher at the Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies (C2N) at CNRS; Paul Voss, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of ECE; and Jean Paul Salvestrini, a professor at Georgia Tech Lorraine and adjunct professor in the Georgia Tech School of ECE.

The research was supported by ANR (Agence Nationale de Recherche), the National Agency of Research in France through the “GANEX” Project.

CITATION: Taha Ayari, et al., “Gas sensors boosted by two-dimensional h-BN enabled transfer on thin substrate foils: towards wearable and portable applications,” (Scientific Reports, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15065-6

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Award Information
Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.ien.gatech.edu/rates/), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment, electron beam lithography (EBL), or tools in the Materials Characterization Facility (MCF) are required. The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN processing staff will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule
This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on October 1, 2017 and April 1, 2018. While it is expected that research activity will begin on December 1, 2017 and June 1, 2017, respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:
1. Provide a project title.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. If assistance is needed with this component, staff members of the IEN are available for consultation.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.

Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame. Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff. Review criteria include novelty of the research, clarity of the proposed work, work that is technically achievable within the time constraints, and likelihood of positive outcomes (funding).

For more information, please contact Dr. David Gottfried, dsgottfried@gatech.edu, (404) 894-0479.

Since its establishment in 1999, Agilent has supported ECE through consortia memberships with the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) and the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium, funded individual faculty research projects in microsystems and electronic design and applications, and within the last five years, its unprecedented in-kind gifts of software, support, and training to GEDC totaling almost $54.3 million–making it the largest gift ever to Georgia Tech.

To find a way to alleviate this problem, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, is hosting the second Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, or SC2. The goal of the challenge is to increase the possibility of access to Wi-Fi for both military and civilian wireless devices. According to the SC2 website, this will be accomplished when “radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, avoiding interference, and jointly exploiting opportunities to achieve the most efficient use of the available spectrum.” The challenge is designed to encourage sharing between networks through a combination of machine learning and communications engineering.

Enter Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures, one of 30 teams selected to participate in SC2. Spearheaded by two Georgia Tech professors – Matthieu Bloch, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) – the team comprises graduate students from both schools and comes out of the interdisciplinary Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT). The team is self-funded, but Bloch and Pokutta have received some support from the National Science Foundation in the form of an EAGER grant in the amount of $99,877, which will support the team’s early efforts.

Describing the Georgia Tech team’s approach to the spectrum challenge, Bloch said, “Here at Tech, we have expertise in both communications engineering and machine learning, and [the solution] that DARPA is looking for is something that integrates the two. The future of communication – for them – has to go through the integration of machine learning and intelligence, and that was a strength we were able to advertise to DARPA. They were happy with our approach because we were proposing an integrated solution from the beginning.”

In terms of solving the challenge through machine learning, Pokutta said, “If you look at machine learning in general, it’s a very powerful technique. At the same time, it’s probably overhyped. You have to create tangible value: applying it to real-world problems and solving them to have impact. It’s like having a hammer. A hammer is a great tool, but if you have nothing to apply it to, it’s completely worthless.”

In other words, the goal of the challenge is collaboration. Collaboration is important for solving SC2, but for Bloch and Pokutta, the collaborative aspect includes training graduate students to be interdisciplinary – to understand not only the nuances of machine learning or communications engineering, but to be fluent in both fields.

There’s something else that sets the Georgia Tech team apart: While Bloch and Pokutta are the professors heading up the challenge – Pokutta compared Bloch and himself to investors in a startup company – the day-to-day work of solving the challenge is led by graduate students in ECE and ISyE.

Jana Boerger is an ISyE master’s student who will graduate this summer before entering the ISyE Ph.D. program in machine learning in fall 2017. She oversees management of the project. From an ISyE perspective, Boerger said, “The challenge shows that the optimization methods we learn in ISyE can be applied to very technical real-world problems.”

But like Pokutta and Bloch, Boerger sees the value of an interdisciplinary approach. She added, “What’s also interesting is that while our team is all students, the other teams in SC2 are companies – heavyweight teams with a lot of money behind them. I think we as students can be successful if we work together, because we have this interdisciplinary team. Innovation happens when you combine two different fields together, like we’re doing. You need to look outside the box and see what’s there and take the tools and the knowledge and combine what you have.”

Pokutta elaborated, “The challenge is a learning experience that encourages creativity. We don’t just want to take something that’s out there and enhance it. Our strategy is to break with the current paradigms, start in the physical area, and redo everything from scratch with collaboration and spectrum-sharing built in from the start, not just as an afterthought to the technology.”

Keerthi Suria Kumar Arumugam is a Ph.D. student in ECE, and he is the communications team leader. Arumugam’s team builds the interface between the hardware components and designs the signal processing algorithms to push meaningful data to machine-learning algorithms.

He explained, “We make sure we can receive signals from the network, process them, receive insights from machine-learning algorithms, and suitably schedule packets that they can then be pushed to the network.”

Over the course of the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the 30 teams will compete in three preliminary competitions – in December of 2017, 2018, and 2019 – with a final competition in 2020, taking place in the recently constructed DARPA Colosseum. The teams have a chance to win as much as $3.5 million in prize money.

The Colosseum, as described by the DARPA SC2 website, is located in a 30-foot by 20-foot server room on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. It is “capable of creating a much larger, and critically important wireless world. If all goes as planned during SC2, competitors … will use the Colosseum … as a world-unique testbed to create radically new paradigms for using and managing access to the electromagnetic spectrum in both military and civilian domains.”

Bloch explained the idea behind holding SC2 in the Colosseum in terms of bringing together a group of people speaking multiple foreign languages in one room: “What DARPA wants is to put people in the room who aren’t speaking the same language. You have no information on what language the others speak. If I speak French and someone else speaks Chinese, there’s little chance that we understand each other. But the key thing – and this is where machine learning kicks in – is that we don’t have to fully understand each other. Maybe we just need to understand high-level features and communicate high-level ideas.”

Pokutta added, “If there are several people in the room, you need to understand when there is a pause in the others’ speaking so you can use that available time to speak for yourself. You don’t need to understand what’s being said; you need to understand when the language is creating gaps or holes you can use for your own communication.”

In the meantime, prior to the preliminary challenges, the Georgia Tech team will compete in “scrimmages,” or informal competitions against several other participating teams that take place in the Colosseum. The scrimmages will provide opportunities for the team to run trials using their own radio networks and to test their algorithms against one another.

Arumugam said, “The scrimmage is an excellent reality check on where we stand with respect to other teams. It is also a great opportunity to experiment with certain features and check how they fare against the other teams. Since the scrimmages are not counted toward the final score, they are essentially rehearsals. We are preparing the first draft of our design to compete against two other teams on June 21.”

Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature and approach of the Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures team, the group is uniquely positioned for success in developing and executing an integrated solution to the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge as it navigates the multi-year, multi-phased competition.

These awards identify the top 15 percent of submitted technologies as ranked by the TechConnect Corporate & Investment Partner Committee, and the innovation rankings are based on the potential positive impact the submitted technology will have on a specific industry sector. Innovations are submitted from global academic technology transfer offices, early-stage companies, small business innovative research (SBIR) awardees, and government and corporate research laboratories.

Zhang and Xia received this award for their technology entitled, “Noise suppression scheme based on phase locked loop for non-contact vital sign detection.” They have developed and experimentally demonstrated the use of a non-contact vital sign detection system using phase locked loop (PLL) to automatically suppress the residual phase noise. A PLL is a negative feedback scheme that synchronizes the output signal with a reference. The designed dual-carrier system uses PLL to lock the phase of one carrier’s beat signal to a low-noise reference signal to suppress the residual phase noise, providing a clean transmission path for the other carrier.

When compared to a similar but unlocked setup, results show that the developed system improves signal to noise ratio by 50 percent at 50 cm. The developed system is also used to successfully measure a heartbeat at 250 cm (more than double the distance of the unlocked system) and at four physical orientations. Potential commercial applications for this technology include biomedical monitoring, healthcare, fitness monitoring, physical monitoring of astronauts/drivers/pilots, and search and rescue operations.