The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering This Report Was Produced with Funds from the Harry Lynde Bradley Foundation
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ECE 2009 The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering This report was produced with funds from the Harry Lynde Bradley Foundation. Photography : Josh Armstrong: p. 5 Rick Griffiths: p. 9 Michael Kiernan: p. 16 John McCormick: pp. 3, 7, 10, 28 Christina O’Connor: pp. 6, 10, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Jim Stroup: pp. 2, 4, 8, 13, 20, 21 Cover illustration by Christina O’Connor. 3 Changing the way electricity is used FEATURES 7 Will Edison win in the end? 8 Removing a barrier to technology transfer 9 Resilient sustainable infrastructures 12 Extreme voltage scaling 16 Next generation genome 20 Cognitive radio goes jammin’ 22 Making assistive technology engineer-friendly 24 Lab-in-a-box goes online 24 Cyber security masters EDUCATION starts in Northern Virginia 25 Dominion donates smart grid equipment 25 Solar-powered sun teaches kids about energy 25 Space@VT RESEARCH 28 Electromagnetics 29 Photonics 30 Embedded systems 32 Computer systems 33 Networking 34 Wireless@VT 36 Power and energy 37 Biomedical applications UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH 15 Seeking the encryption key in sub-threshold voltage circuits 22 Making assistive technology engineer-friendly 30 Creating a visual environment for safety-critical embedded software 34 Improving GPS performance indoors 2 From the Department Head 38 Bradley Fellows 40 Bradley Scholars 42 Ph.D. degrees awarded 43 Corporate & industrial affiliates 44 Donors to ECE 45 ECE industrial advisory board 46 Honors and achievements 48 ECE faculty Produced by Uncork-it Communications PERfSrom tPhe DEepCarTtmIeVntEHeS ad s the country seeks energy independence, While our efforts and successes continue to a sustainable infrastructure and an envi - grow, the tremendous growth in faculty since ronmentally friendly lifestyle, much of January of 2005 slowed this year. This fall, we Athe technology needed will be developed welcomed Mike Ruohoniemi and Joseph Baker, by electrical and computer engineers. ECE at Vir - who completed our hiring for the Center for ginia Tech is ready for that challenge. We believe Space Science and Engineering Research. With our work and ideas will also generate opportuni - their arrival, ECE became the lead on the Super - ties and jobs to help build a robust economy. DARN network, an international collaboration Much of the work to be done harkens back to map space weather phenomena. Mike also ob - to the roots of our field – manipulating and trans - tained a new $2 million grant to build more radar mitting power and energy. We take pride that we stations in the United States (p. 27). have one of the largest and oldest power engi - Our faculty members continue to be hon - neering programs in the country. The first “smart ored for their efforts. Sandeep Shukla has just re - grid” technology was built here, and we continue turned from serving as an invited professor at the to be leaders in transmission and power network French National Institute for Computer Science technology. Our engineers are also involved in and Automation. The Homboldt Foundation of developing energy storage technology, alterna - Germany honored him with the prestigious tive energy technology, and technology that re - Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Fellowship for lifetime James S. Thorp duces energy use. achievement within 12 years of completing a Department Head In this issue, you’ll read how a huge 10-year Ph.D. and he will spend the summer in Germany effort by the Center for Power Electronics Sys - as a fellow. In the teaching arena, Jaime de la Ree tems changed power processing with modular was awarded the university Wine Award for a his - electronics technology that can help the country tory of teaching excellence. save 30 percent of its electricity use. You’ll read I offer my thanks to Dan Sable, who finished about Leyla Nazhandali’s NSF CAREER award his second term as the chair of the Advisory Much of the technology (p. 12) that will help her develop technology for Board, and to Gino Manzo, who is the new chair. needed for energy mobile embedded systems to operate at less than Dan was responsible for the early success of our independence, 10 percent of the power they now require. And Space program and Gino hopes to make a similar sustainable don’t miss the article on how Lamine Mili, impact on our microelectronics program. Sandeep Shukla, and Yilu Liu are working to ex - I will be retiring this summer, but intend to infrastructure, and tend complex systems theory to making our stay in Blacksburg and take advantage of all the environmentally power and communications infrastructures more nation’s new-found interest in research in energy. friendly lifestyles resilient (p. 9). I leave the ECE Department in good hands. In the communications area, Tamal Bose, We conducted a national search for department will be developed co-director of Wireless@VT is involved in sev - head this year and had several strong and exciting by electrical and eral stimulus projects with Virginia firms (see candidates. We are delighted that our own Scott computer engineers. p. 20). Wireless@VT is also building the largest Midkiff has accepted the position. Scott is an ex - ECE at Virginia Tech cognitive radio network testbed in the country, cellent choice to lead the department to increased installing nodes in a new building on campus. stature and future success as we tackle the tech - is ready for ECEs are also critical to solutions in bio - nological issues the country faces today. that challenge. medical applications. On page 16 we describe how Yue (Joseph) Wang is applying bioinformat - ics and systems theory to unravel the mysteries of cancer and other diseases. 2 CHANGING THE WAY ELECTRICITY IS USED decade ago, Virginia Tech power electronics researchers adopted three verbs – standardize, modularize, and inte - Power grate – and developed a concept that not only triggered a multi-university, multi-million-dollar center, but also impacted billions of dollars of commercial technology Aand has the potential to slash U.S. electrical use by up to electronics 33 percent. Power electronics is the use of electronic circuits to convert and control electricity. The technology is used to process and convert can slash raw, generated electricity into the voltage, wave form, and type (ac or dc) needed by today’s machines, motors, and electronic equip - ment. In 1998, power electronics was a $60-billion industry world - electricity wide that impacted another $570 billion in hardware electronic sales. Power electronics systems were typically custom-designed, non- standard units containing 300-400 electronic components. They use 33% were expensive and required long development times, plus there was little integration and fairly low reliability, according to Fred Lee, director of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES). The integrated power module In the late ’90s, Virginia Tech’s power electronics researchers were tackling a problem for Intel, trying to boost the speed of the power processing so the Pentium II chip could achieve its design speed. The solution came from “taking the complicated solution and breaking it into small, modular pieces, then making it scalable,” Lee says. “We gave the idea – the multi-phase voltage regu - lator module (VRM) – to industry and today every mi - croprocessor in the world is powered by the technology.” The VRM, he says, helped to revitalize the U.S. power electronics industry. During the ’90s, power sup - ply manufacturing was being moved offshore with the rest of electronics equipment. “The industry was bot - tom-line oriented, and there was little focus on research. Today, just the power modules for microprocessors alone comprise a couple billion-dollar industry.” The VRM success triggered the Virginia Tech team to propose Right: Fred Lee, director of the that power electronics technology for all-sized electrical applications, Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) and co-director from aircraft to portable phones, could be made more efficient by Dushan Boroyevich, left. integrating intelligent power electronics modules (IPEM). The con - cept met with approval among researchers and industry. 3 quired technical advances in mul - tiple areas simultaneously, from semiconductor adhesives, to sys - tem integration models. In pur - suing these advances, CPES has generated more than 1700 tech - nical papers, theses, and disserta - tions, 131 invention disclosures, 50 patents, and 331 licenses. CPES demonstrated the first IPEM in 2000 and the concept moved quickly into the market - place. Today, many power elec - tronics firms manufacture some version of an IPEM, according to Lee. The concept has seen the most impact in three applica - tions, he says: motor drives, elec - tronic ballasts, and information Long-term NSF support Integrated Power Electronics technology. These are also three applications that Modules (IPEM) developed at In 1998, the Virginia Tech researchers teamed can have the most impact on energy consumption. CPES that could improve effi - up with power electronics researchers at the Uni - ciency and reliability of future versity of Wisconsin-Madison and advanced Motor drives electric energy systems while power semiconductor researchers at Rensselaer Motor drives account for about 50 percent of decreasing costs. The top Polytechnic Institute to form CPES, one of 20 En - the electricity use in the United States and have IPEM uses embedded power gineering Research Centers (ERC) sponsored by been a targeted application for IPEMs since the technology and the bottom the National Science Foundation (NSF). They start, with a focus on variable-speed motors. Vari - uses flex power. were joined by researchers at North Carolina A&T able-speed drives that match the output to the load State University and the University of Puerto can often achieve an energy reduction of 30-35 Rico-Mayagüez, institutions with solid reputa - percent. The larger motor drives that power fac - tions in undergraduate engineering and power tories and large equipment typically use variable electronics-related research.