ECE 507 Seminar Series
Spring 2008

When: Fridays 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Where: Cramer Hall, Room 171: 1721 SW Broadway

Led by Dr. Y.C. Jenq
Office: FAB 160-19, email: jenq@ece.pdx.edu

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Requirements
Apr. 4
Apr. 11
Apr. 18
Apr. 25
May 2
May 9
May 16
May 23
May 30

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Requirements for "P" grade
N = a total number of seminars for the Winter 2007 term

1. Be on time and sign an attendance list before seminar starts. If you are late you might not get a chance to sign in. If you sign in late it counts for 1/2 of a seminar.

2. Some seminars will also have a second list signing at the end of the seminar. (It will be announced at the end of the seminar before 2:50 p.m.)

3. Attend N-1 seminars - student signature on the attendance lists (if two attendance lists are being required for a specific seminar your signature needs to appear on both).

4. You can substitute no more than one seminar of the required departmental seminars.

Possible substitution:

a. Other seminars offered by the ECE PSU department can be used. Other seminars (not ECE PSU) need to be approved by the instructor ahead of time.

b. Students are required to write a two-page summary of the attended seminar.

Important Rules:

• Be on time (2:00 p.m.).
• Do not disturb during presentations.
• No list signing during presentations.
• Do not use cellular phones.
• Do not use your laptop or any other electric device during the lecture.
• Please show courtesy to our distinguished speakers with your kind behavior.

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April 4

SPEAKER:
Y.C. Jenq
Professor, PSU

TITLE:
TBA

BIO:
Dr. Jenq received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Princeton University. He has been an IEEE fellow since 1993. His research interests include general areas of communications and signal processing. He is particularly interested in the practical aspects of the theory and applications of advanced digital signal processing techniques. These include applications in adaptive signal processing, medical signal processing, instrumentation and measurements, audio/video applications, data compression, and A/D & D/A converters.

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April 11

SPEAKER:
Dan Mendell
President/CEO, Neutralspace, Inc.

TITLE:
TBA

ABSTRACT:
I'd like to discuss what is going on in the market for calendering and most specifically in the Open Source community, and how it all ties together these days. I will also try to discuss this in the context of micro-formats which appear to be really picking up steam on the internet.

BIO:
TBA

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April 18

SPEAKER:
Leo Yau
Retired Intel Fellow

TITLE:
History of the Transistor

ABSTRACT:
The Transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947 and the three inventors ( Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley) received the Physics Nobel Prize in 1956. The invention of the Transistor was not an accident.  The three inventors were all trained in Modern Atomic Physics and they systematically applied their knowledge in Quantum Theory to demonstrate the first Solid-State Amplifier.  Of the three credited for the invention of the Transistor, only Bardeen and Brattain were present during the invention.  Some historians do not agree that Shockley should get the credit. However, during the time of the invention, the theoretical works of Shockley in Bipolar and Field-Effect Transistors turn out to be far more significant to the evolution of the Transistor Technology.

The speaker will give an old fashion lecture from his experience as a graduate student in the early 60's towards his understanding of the Transistor.

BIO:
Leo Yau retired from Intel in 2000 and his last position was Director of Innovative Technology Modules.  He was an Intel Fellow and IEEE Fellow. Born August 15, 1940 in Cantilan, Surigao del Sur, Philippines, he received his BS Degree (1962) from the Univ. of San  Carlos, Cebu City Philippines;  MS degree (1965) from the Univ. of Minnesota, and Ph. D. Degree (1969) from the U. of Illinois, in Urbana, Illinois, all degrees in Electrical Engineering. He taught at the Univ. of the Philippines (1969-1970) and Univ. of Illinois (1970-1973).  He worked at Bell Labs (1973-1978) in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and Intel (1978-2000) in Portland, Oregon.

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April 25

SPEAKER:
Mike Butts
Ambric Fellow, Ambric, Inc.

TITLE:
Multi-core and Massively Parallel Platforms and Moore's Law Scalability

ABSTRACT:
A number of parallel processing architectures are entering mainstream use in embedded systems. SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) multithreaded architectures, now common in desktops and servers, are well known. New massively parallel architectures, specifically aimed at high-performance media, imaging, networking and wireless appplications, have recently appeared. This seminar introduces and explores these platform choices, in the context of single-processor, DSP, FPGA and ASIC alternatives. It also looks at the long-term scalability of all these platform choices as Moore's Law moves forward.

BIO:
Mike Butts is Fellow at Ambric, a Portland fabless semiconductor startup.  He has an extensive background in computer architecture and large-scale reconfigurable hardware, and is the co-inventor of hardware logic emulation. Mike developed several reconfigurable chips and system
products at Mentor Graphics, Quickturn, Synopsys, and Cadence Design Systems, and he was co-founder of Tabula. Mike has 37 U.S. patents, a number of IEEE papers, and serves on the committee for the IEEE FCCM conference.  He has BSEE and MSEE/CS degrees from MIT.

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May 2

SPEAKER:
Whitlow W. L. Au
Marine Mammal Research Program
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

TITLE:
Dolphin sonar detection and discrimination capabilities

ABSTRACT:
Dolphins have a very sophisticated short range sonar that surpass all technological sonar in its capabilities to perform complex target discrimination and recognition tasks.  The system that the U.S. Navy has for detecting mines buried under ocean sediment is one that uses Atlantic bottlenose dolphins.  However, close examination of the dolphin sonar system will reveal that the dolphin acoustic "hardware" is fairly ordinary and not very special.  The transmitted signals have peak-to-peak amplitudes as high as 225 - 228 dB re 1  Pa which translate to an rms value of approximately 210 - 213 dB.  The transmit beamwidth is fairly broad at about 10o in both the horizontal and vertical planes and the receiving beamwidth is slightly broader by several degrees.  The auditory filters are not very narrow with Q values of about 8.4.  Despite these fairly ordinary features of the acoustic system, these animals still demonstrate very unusual and astonishing capabilities.  Some of the capabilities of the dolphin sonar system will be presented and the reasons for their keen sonar capabilities will be discussed.  Important features of their sonar include the broadband click-like signals used, adaptive sonar search capabilities and large dynamic range of its auditory system.

BIO:
TBA

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May 9

SPEAKER:
Tom Figliulo
Director, SolutionsWorks, Inc.

TITLE:
TBA

ABSTRACT:
TBA

BIO:
Tom Figliulo is Director of Services and Training for the SolutionsWorks ZigBee technology including BeePlex which applies the publish subscribe paradigm  to mesh networking. While at StorageTek
Tom co-authored a paper which was published by the IEEE. Tom presented the work at the IEEE Aerospace Applications Conference. He developed new RAID pointer manipulation technology OEMed by IBM and others for data base recovery and backup (Snapshot Copy for Iceberg and RVA) . While at Hughes and later Raytheon Tom designed the data base architecture of a Satellite mission management and launch system which enabled the networked telemetry and mission management databases to be self-healing. This software is currently in use by NASA at Goddard Space Center marked by Raytheon under the name Eclipse (TM).

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May 16

SPEAKER:
Chin-Chuen Teoh
PSU Ph.D. Candidate

TITLE:
Financial Engineering for Energy System Capital Budgeting

ABSTRACT:
TBA

BIO:
Chin-Chuen Teoh is currently working for ABB at Santa Clara, California. At the same time, he is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Portland State University, Portland Oregon. He attended Iowa State University, receiving his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2004 and M.S. degree in Economics in 2006. His research interests include application of financial methodologies for energy system expansion, real options analysis of asset valuation, value of information, process modeling of dynamic decision and optimization support systems, risk management and analysis, decision analysis, power market analysis, physical assets and financial contracts hedging, economics, power system analysis and financial engineering methodologies.

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May 23

SPEAKER:
Sazzad Hossain
PSU Ph.D. Candidate

TITLE:
Classical and Quantum Search Algorithms for Quantum Circuits and Optimization of Quantum Oracles

ABSTRACT:
We observe an enormous increase in the computational power of digital computers. This was due to the revolution in manufacturing processes and controlling semiconductor structures on submicron scale, ultimately leading to the control of individual atoms. Eventually, the classical electric circuits encountered the barrier of quantum mechanics and its effects. However, the laws of quantum mechanics can be also used to produce computational devices that lead to extraordinary speed increases over classical computers. Thus quantum computing becomes a very promising and attractive research area. The Computer Aided Design for Quantum circuits becomes an essential ingredient for such emerging research which may lead to these powerful computers to be realized-an era of Quantum computing. This thesis presents an integrated theoretical study of software algorithms to design circuits of quantum oracles as well as methods for designing quantum oracles for Grover algorithm to solve combinatorial problems. An implementation of quantum algorithm involves the initialization of the input state and its manipulation with quantum gates followed by the measurements. In Grover algorithm the problem to be solved is specified by a permutative logic oracle - the fundamental problem is then how to build this oracle from quantum logic circuits and how to optimize these circuits. These problems are NP-hard and require search algorithms. In future, the search will be also done in quantum and this thesis leads to quantum algorithms to design quantum circuits more efficiently.

BIO:
TBA

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May 30

SPEAKER:
Raymond Gao
PSU Ph.D. Candidate

TITLE:
CMOL and Neural Associative Memories

ABSTRACT:
Here we introduce a highly simplified model of the neocortex based on spiking neurons, and then investigate various mappings of this model to the CMOL CrossNet nanogrid nanoarchitecture. The performance/price is estimated for several architectural configurations both with and without nano-scale circuits. In this analysis we explore the time multiplexing of computational hardware for a pulse based variation of the model. Our analysis demonstrates that the mixed-signal CMOL
implementation has the best performance/price in both non-spiking and spiking neural models. However, these circuits also have serious power density issues when interfacing the nanowire crossbars to analog CMOS circuits. Although the results presented here are based on biologically based computation, the use of pulse based data representation for nano-scale circuits has much potential as a general architectural technique for a range of nano-circuit implementation.

BIO:
Changjian Gao received B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 1995; M.S. degree in Circuits and Systems from Beijing Institute of Radio Measurement, Beijing, China, in 1998; and the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from OGI/OHSU, Beaverton, OR, in 2005. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Portland State University, Portland, OR, working with Prof. Dan Hammerstrom. His research interests include biologically inspired circuits design, CMOS, FPGA, computer architecture, and embedded systems design.

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