ECE News

 

Spring 2011

 

  • Lisa M. Zurk has been appointed as the Maseeh Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Zurk was recognized for her developement of the Northwest Electromagnetic and Acoustics Research Lab (NEAR-Lab) and as a top researcher for the college. Congratulations!
  • Capstone Poster Competition

Twenty-one posters were on display for the ECE department's third annual Capstone Poster Competition held on June 3rd.  The number of ECE Capstone students was up this year due in part to the addition of nineteen Intel Vietnam scholars.  The judges commented that the quality of this year's posters was the best they had seen. The best overall project was sponsored by Intel and titled "TIU Tracking System." Members of the team are pictured below: Tri Truong, Dung Le, Daniel Ferguson, Mark Faust (Capstone Adviser), Lynh Pham, and Man Hoang. To view their poster and those of the other winners, click here.

  • Marek Perkowski's Students Continue to Soar

Four of Dr. Marek Perkowski’s high school students, part of his research group and Sunday seminars, recently won multiple awards in science fairs, created new quantum circuit synthesis algorithms to surpass the best previously existing ones, built an intelligent robot controlled by a simulated quantum circuit, and some went as far as meeting with President Obama and being mentioned by name in his speech he gave at Intel in Beaverton.

Arushi Raghuvanshi, Yushi Wang, Sidharth Dhawan and Edison Tsai are outstanding students in the words of Dr. Perkowski, who even describes Tsai as "a genius" and "the most independent and creatively thinking student I have ever met in my whole academic career of 43 years." They are young and their research and discoveries are promising.

Two of Oregon's five high school semifinalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search, a program of Society for Science and the Public, come from this team.  The students are among 1,744 entrants from 30 states and the District of Columbia who will receive $1,000 and move closer to the finals. For more on this story and on these wonderful youth, click here.

  • After 40 years at PSU, Professor of ECE and Systems Science, George Lendaris, is retiring.
  • An Academic Honesty Policy was voted into effect in May. Click here to read it.
  • Christof Teuscher has become an IEEE senior member.
  • Dan Hammerstrom was elected as Editor of IEEE Transactions on Technology.

Winter 2011

  • Three ECE faculty were honored for their length of service to the University. Fu Li has been with the department for 20 years, Paul Van Halen for 25 and George Lendaris for 40.
  • James Morris co-authored the text "Reliability of Microtechnology: Interconnects, Devices and Systems." The big is published by Springer.
  • Faculty of ECE unanimously voted for a new mission and vision for the department. Click here to read it.

  • Arpita SinhaECE graduate student Arpita Sinha was awarded a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research for her proposal "Neuromorphic non-linear networks." The Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research program has a highly competitive application process and only approximately 20% of applicants receive any level of funding. The local Sigma Xi chapter generously provides additional matching funds for accepted proposals. Arpita is working in teuscher.:Lab and is also a recipient of the Intel-MCECS Graduate Scholarship. Arpita is shown at left with her adviser Christof Teuscher.
  • DARPA has approved a $300k phase 2 contract of the SyNAPSE program. Dan Hammerstrom is the Principle Investigaor for the PSU subcontract.
  • Professor Dan Hammerstrom has become an IEEE Fellow.
  • Professor Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske was reelected for a second three-year term to IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Board of Governors (2011-2013).
  • Professor James E. Morris has been elected to a three year term (2011-2013) on the Board of Governors (BoG) of the Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE is the world's largest professional society, with nearly 400,000 members world-wide, and the CPMT Society organizes its conferences and publications in electronics packaging and related areas worldwide. The BoG is responsible for CPMT finances, planning, and operational oversight.  
    Dr. Morris is no stranger to the CPMT BoG, having been previously elected in 1996-1998. He first joined as Educational Liaison Chair in 1989, and subsequently served as CPMT Treasurer (1991-1997) and as Vice-President for Conferences (1998-2003), winning the CPMT David Feldman Outstanding Contribution Award in 2005. Jim is also a CPMT Distinguished Lecturer, an Associate-Editor for two of its journals, currently chairs the Oregon CPMT/CAS joint chapter, and continues to serve on multiple conference program and steering committees. He also represents the CPMT Society on the IEEE Nanotechnology Council (NTC), and in this role founded the NTC Nanopackaging Technical Committee, serves as NTC Awards Chair, and contributes to the IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine. Jim will chair the NTC's annual IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology in Portland next year (ieeenano2011.org).

Fall 2010

  • James Morris was elected to the IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Society (CPMT) Board of Governors for a three year term (2011/2012/2013).

  • Christof TeuscherChristof Teuscher (pictured at left) presented a special session talk on "Self-assembled Nanoscale On-Chip Interconnect: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" at the International Conference on Hardware-Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS 2010) in Scottsdale, AZ. CODES+ISSS is the premier event in design of embedded systems hardware, software and tools. The special session on "Unconventional Fabrics, Architectures, and Models for Future Multi-core Systems" was organized by Radu Marculescu (CMU), Partha Pande (WSU), and Christof Teuscher (PSU).

Spring 2010

  • ECE graduates and their families packed the house for the department's fourth annual Graduation & Awards Ceremony. Click here for graduates, award winners and photos of the event.
  • The ECE department held it's 2nd annual Capstone Poster Competition on May 28. Thirteen teams presented posters representing their senior capstone projects. Top prize was earned by the project titled "Single Head Galvo Driver Board" sponsored by ESI and advised by Dr. Branimir Pejcinovic. The group, pictured at left, consists of Eric Sorensen, Matthew Blackmore, Shaun Oschner, and Hoa Quach. To view their poster along with the other top teams, click here.NEAR-Lab Hawaii
  • As part of the NEAR-Lab’s Conservation Technology Initiative (CTI), Dr. Helen H. Ou and Eric Sorensen (pictured at center and right) conducted acoustic sensing experiments at multiple sites in Hawaii in March 2010. The three-week long experiment consisted of five sea trips. Ou and Sorensen tested the performance of latest SOREN 3.0 sensors for the detection and localization of motorized vessels in the Marine Protected Areas (MPA) of Hawaii. Their research objective is to protect more than 400 species of inshore and reef fishes inhabiting Hawaii’s Coastal waters from illegal poaching activities. During the three-week experiment, the NEAR-Lab received on site assistance from The Nature Conservancy in Hawaii, the Division of Aquatic Resources of the State of Hawaii, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Read more here.
  • Three ECE grad students claimed top prizes in the Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics catagory at the sixth annual Sigma-Xi Poster Symposium held April 16. The winners shows left to right above: First Place - Mrugesh Mote, "Modeling and simulation of randomly self-assembled nanowire networks," Second Place - Avinash Amarnath, "A self-configurable computing architecture on an irregular reconfigurable fabric," Third Place - Alireza Goudarzi "Information processing in random automata networks." All three students work under the guidance of Dr. Christof Teuscher. Click here to view their posters.

Winter 2010

  • Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske was honored for 20 years of service at PSU.
  • Christof Teuscher will be giving an invited 3-day seminar on "Novel Computing Architectures and Paradigms: Challenges and Opportunities" at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Mar 22-24, 2010. The seminar will provide an overview on emerging technologies with a focus on novel computing paradigms, machines, and systems. The goal is to outline the problems and grand challenges we face in the near and far term and to provide in-depth overviews of emerging technologies at the device, architecture, and system's level.
  • Martin Siderius was elected in December, 2010 to Chair the Acoustical Oceanography Technical Committee (for the Acoustical Society of America). This is for a new 3 year term.
  • At the 2009 ICCAD held in San Jose in November, Dr. Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske (left) received the 2008 Donald Peterson Best Paper Award for a paper entitled "Using Simulation and Satisfiability to Compute Flexibilities in Boolean Networks." Dr. Chrzanowska-Jeske co-authored the paper with her former Ph.D. student, Jin Zhang, and a group of collaborators from UC Berkley and Synopsis.

Fall 2009

  • Jeff Hoffman & Don Tornquist have been chosen for the 2009-2010 ECE Undergraduate Honors Program. The program enables undergraduates to go beyond their normal studies to work with faculty in the area of their choice: research, entrepreneurship or innovation.
  • Richard Campbell and Portland State Unversity are mentioned prominently in a new article titled, "Want to Bone Up On Wireless Tech? Try Ham Radio," in Computerworld magazine. Dr. Campbell is quoted for his experience with ham radios and their use with commercial applications.
  • Richard Campbell was recently issued 4 patents in the High Frequency Measurements field:
    • United States Patent no. 7,609,077 October 27, 2009 Differential Signal Probe with integral balun
      Inventors: Richard Campbell, Eric W. Strid, Mike Andrews
    • United States Patent no. 7,449,899 November 11, 2008 Probe for High Frequency Signals
      Inventors: Richard L. Campbell, Michael Andrews, Lynh Bui
    • United States Patent no. 7,443,186 October 28, 2008 On-wafer test structures for Differential Signals
      Inventors: Eric Strid, Richard Campbell
    • United States Patent no. 7,403,028 July 22, 2008 Test structure and probe for differential signals
      Inventor: Richard Campbell
  • Dr. Teuscher gave an invited tutorial on Emerging Technologies at the NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS-2009).
  • New Lab Security Measures - Due to security concerns and theft from the Tektronix Circuits Lab, the ECE department is installing additional security measures. At this time a security camera is installed that records entrances to the lab.

    In the future, we plan to install card-key access to the room as well. Once these measures are in place, we will be in a position to keep the labs open 24/7, as was done in the past. If you have concerns about the new system, please contact our lab coordinator Phillip K. Wong at ecelab@cecs.pdx.edu.

  • New "Blue Sheet" Tracks - For more information about the new Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering degree tracks, please visit our Undergraduate Forms and Links page.

  • Program Changes in BSEE and BSCMP Approved - PSU Faculty Senate recently approved program changes in Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. New programs will:

    1. feature fewer credits for completion - roughly 180 vs. more than 190 in the old programs;
    2. introduce new senior elective "tracks" that will enable students to study certain areas in more depth and focus;
    3. reorganize freshman ECE experience through three new courses;
    4. introduce design early on, even in freshman courses.

    All of this should address many of the suggestions and feedback we received from our alumni and industry. Read more information about Fall 2009 Program Changes.

Summer 2009

  • Supported by Intel Corporation, twenty Vietnamese undergraduate students have started their transition to PSU by attending summer programs in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Beginning this Fall, the students will complete their last two years of their Bachelor degrees in either Electrical or Computer Engineering at Portland State University. Please see the Business Journal for more information.
  • Four summer interns joined Dr. Teuscher's lab this summer. Teuscher InternsThe students are working on projects in the area of self-assembling nanoscale interconnects, biomolecular computing, self-assembling systems, and agent-based optimization methods for new computing architectures. The mission of Teuscher's lab is to study, rethink, model, and design the implementation of computations in living and non-living systems.

    Dr. Teuscher is also organizing the 2009 Summer Intern Seminar Series for interns in the ECE and CS department. For more information, click here.

From left to right: Lillian Olney, incoming PSU student in CS/ECE/biomedical informatics; Nolan Hergert, undergraduate student in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University; Erica Hose, Saturday Academy ASE intern, Centennial High School; Jonathan Aherne, Saturday Academy ASE intern, West Linn High School.

  • Summer Interns Author Research Paper
    College summer intern Nolan Hergert (Carnegie Mellon University), Saturday Academy ASE high school summer intern Jonathan Aherne (West Linn High School), and PSU grad students Neha Parashar and Mrugesh Mote co-authored a paper entitled "Wire Cost and Comunication Analysis of Self-Assembled Interconnect Models for Networks-on-Chip." The paper investigates design trade-offs for self-assembled non-classical network topologies within a network-on-chip (NoC) simulation framework. The paper will be presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Network on Chip Architectures (NoCArc'09) to be held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-42) in New York, NY, USA. The research is lead by Dr. Christof Teuscher, who's research group (http://teuscher-lab.ece.pdx.edu) investigates future and emerging computing architectures and machines.

Spring 2009

  • Dr. Martin Siderius was awarded the Medwin Prize in Acoustical Oceanography from the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), for his research accomplishments in the field of acoustical oceanography. This award was presented to him at the society's semi-annual meeting, which took place in downtown Portland on May 18-22. He is the ninth recipient of the Medwin Prize, which is given annually to a young to mid-career scientist who demonstrates effective use of sound in the discovery and understanding of physical and biological parameters and processes in the sea. As part of the honor, Dr. Siderius gave a one-hour prize lecture titled "Seabed characterization and model based processing: Past, present, and future," in which he summarized more than a decade of sea experiments and modeling research. Click here for more on this story.
  • 1st Annual Capstone Poster Competition Held

    1st Place The ECE Department held it's first annual Capstone Poster Competition on May 29. Visitors from industry, area high schools, alumni, and current students came to view posters highlighting the projects students have been working on their senior year. Students complete their undergraduate studies by working on a Capstone project in groups on a project of their choice that is sponsored by local industry. PSU has been recognized for many years as one of the best colleges for Capstone projects by U.S. News and World Report.

    Pictured at left are first place winners Andrew Chuinard, Tim Chairet, Eric Lochbrunner, and Forest Kernan. Their project was titled "Optical Elastography of Skin" sponsored by OHSU and advised by Dr. Lisa Zurk. This group also was awarded the ECE Capstone Team of the Year. Click here for a link to their poster and to a list of the other winners and posters.

    IIIst Visit
  • Professor XiangFu Zong, the President of the Shanghai Institute of Information Science and Technology visited the PSU campus from April 1 - 3, 2009. The Institute is the education partner of PSU in Shanghai.

Pictured from left: Dr. Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske, ECE Chair; XiangFu Zong, President of the Shanghai Institute of Information Science and Technology; Prof. Judy Reed of IELS; MCECS Dean Dick Knight; Wuchi Feng, CS Chair; and Marcia Fischer, MCECS Assistant Dean.

  • Click here to view our 2008-2009 gradutes and award winners, graduate pictures and photos from our Spring 2009 Graduation Ceremony.
  • Dr. Teuscher recently became a full member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society and a researcher at the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI).
  • The ECE Senior Capstone Team of Amra Ljucevic, Emily Smith and Stephen Zhuo won third place in the Engineering and Physics category of the Sigma Xi Student Research Symposium which took place at PSU on April 3, 2009. The title of their poster was "Exploring the World of Ocean Acoustics by Real Time Data Gathering and Transmission". This research is sponsored by The Nature Conservancy with the objective being to design an underwater acoustic recording device for monitoring sounds around coral reefs (and other marine protected areas). Since fish and other marine life make a variety of sounds these acoustic recordings are an important diagnostic tool for determining the health of these ecosystems.  The recording device is built around the Google G1 phone and the goal is to record, save, and wirelessly transmit acoustic data, GPS position and photographs. The team is advised by Associate Professor Dr. Martin Siderius. Click here to view their poster.
  • Dr. Dan Hammerstrom jointly ran a workshop with Intel on March 2-3 titled, "Technology Maturity for Massively Parallel Adaptive Computing - A Workshop to Chart Architectural Readiness of Real-World Applications," at Portland State University.  It was funded by Intel, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.
  • Branimir Pejcinovic has been invited to give a talk on "Applications and Recent Developments in THz Research" at the MEET conference in Croatia, May 25-29, 2009.
  • Christof Teuscher was invited to join the program committee of the 2009 Spatial Computing Workshop and of the International Workshop on Natural Computing (IWNC), 2009. He was also nominated as financial chair of the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures, Nanoarch 2009.
  • Two ECE professors were honored by President Wim Wiewel in a ceremony on March 10th for their multiple years of service. Marek Perkowski has been at PSU for 25 years and Richard Tymerski has been here for 20. Thanks for all of your hard work!
  • Christof Teuscher has been invited to give a tutorial on emerging technologies at the NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS-2009), which will be held in San Francisco, Jul 29 - Aug 1, 2009, in conjunction with the Design Automation Conference (DAC-2009).

Winter 2009

  • Dr. Dan Hammerstrom has been appointed an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology.
  • Dr. Marek Perkowski is one of six PSU professors to be awarded the 2008 Excellence in Community-based Research award. The award is giving to faculty members or teams who use their research to aid in the growth of the community. Dr. Perkowski's award is based on his ongoing work with a group of 12-15 year olds in the subjects of intelligent robotics and quantum computing. Many of the students have presented papers at international conferences and have received numerous awards, including Yale Fan who was awarded a $50,000 scholarship from the Davidson Fellow Laureate Project.
  • ECE Professor and Chair Dr. Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske has been elected to serve on the IEEE Circuit and Systems Society Board of Governors for the period of 2008-2010.
  • In December, 2008, Dr. Dan Hammerstrom co-organized a workshop NIPS (Neural Information Processing Conference) with a group from CMU on "Parallel Implementations of Learning Algorithms: What Have You Done For Me Lately?"
  • At the 2008 Congress on Evolutionary Computation in June, Christopher Jorgensen, Professor Garrison Greenwood, and Peyman Arefi, won the Best Overall Paper award for "Intrinsic Fault Recovery for Aging Effects in Embedded Systems." A $250 honorarium was attached to the award.
  • Ph.D. candidate Jorge Quijano has been awarded a Graduate Traineeship Award by the Office of Naval Research to support his ongoing research on Ocean Bottom Scattering at mid-frequencies. Read more.

Fall 2008

  • Dr. Robert Daasch and his students Liwei Ning and Amit Nahar have received the 2008 Technical Excellence Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). They will receive a $5000 award for their work titled "Outlier Screening for Reduced Burn-In."
  • 21 ECE students made the Dean and President's list for Fall 2008. Click here to view the list
  • Dr. Richard Campbell has been awarded a NASA Tech Brief Award for NTR no. 45494: "On-Wafer Measurement of the World's First Submillimeter-wave Silicon CMOS Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) at 324 GHz." The award represents Dr. Campbell's work with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
  • Dr. Marek Perkowski is one of six PSU professors to be awarded the 2008 Excellence in Community-based Research award. The award is giving to faculty members or teams who use their research to aid in the growth of the community. Dr. Perkowski's award is based on his ongoing work with a group of 12-15 year olds in the subjects of intelligent robotics and quantum computing. Many of the students have presented papers at international conferences and have received numerous awards, including Yale Fan who was awarded a $50,000 scholarship from the Davidson Fellow Laureate Project.
  • ECE Professor and Chair Dr. Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske has been elected to serve on the IEEE Circuit and Systems Society Board of Governors for the period of 2008-2010.

Summer 2008

  • The ECE department held its second annual departmental graduation and awards ceremony on June 13th. Dr. Branimir Pejcinovic was the master of ceremony and Frank Goovaerts, Director of Engineering at Tektronix, was the keynote speaker. Click here to see the graduates and award winners.

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