ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING TODAY

ECE doctoral candidate Al-Amin Ahmed Simon was recently granted access to the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) as part of a Rapid Turnaround Experiment aimed at developing a better temperature sensor. The NSUF is a program established by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy for the purpose of accelerating nuclear power research. Specifically, they seek to understand how radiation affects existing and proposed reactor materials over time. Al-Amin and his collaborators have been developing sensors made for high-radiation environments. His team includes ECE masters student Lyle Jones, Dr. Isabella Van Rooyen from the Idaho National Lab, and Dr. Maria Mitkova, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boise State. Al-Amin's research will provide reliability data about a new type of printed temperature sensor, which utilizes the phase-change property of chalcogenide glass.  Ultimately, this research will lead to an improved ability to measure temperatu...

Adam Croteau is pursuing his master of science in electrical and computer engineering at Boise State University.  Join us at 10 AM on Friday, July 10 , for a presentation of Croteau's thesis  Design and Characterization of Low-Temperature Co-Fired Ceramic Dielectric Barrier Discharge Plasma Arrays for Killing and Removing Bacterial Biofilms.   Image of a Floating Plasma Line Cold atmospheric pressure (CAP) plasma has found novel uses in the electronics, medical, and food processing industries. CAP devices that can remove or etch away bacterial biofilm are free from harmful cleaning chemicals and completely renewable. Devices such as these represent the next step in medical and agricultural sanitation and disinfection and are currently under testing and optimization at Boise State University.  Image of a Plasma Array This research highlights the current state-of-the-art in dielectric barrier discharge CAP devices at Boise State. Single line discharge devices and plasm...

Free Public Seminar - Wednesdays at 10:30 AM - Micron Engineering Center, Room 114 Featuring Andong Yue, ECE PhD Student Simulation of an Industrial Magnetron Using Cathode Modulation  ABSTRACT |  Magnetrons are highly efficient high-power microwave sources that can be phase-locked using external systems. Results of a simulation study of the L3Harris CWM75KW industrial strapped magnetron will be presented. This study is part of a larger project covering the feasibility of achieving phase control and faster startup in the magnetron via controlled electron injection using gated field emission arras (GFEAs). The device was simulated by using the 3-D PIC code VSim at its typical operating conditions. The startup behavior was examined with 1) no priming of any kind, 2) RF Priming, and 3) cathode modulation. With no priming, no oscillations were seen up to 300 ns; with RF priming for the first 50 ns, oscillations were then observed at 150 ns; and with the cathode, m...

Students Setting up a Tetrahedron Sensor Structure to Monitor Gunshot in Field Tests Left to right: Grady Anderson, John Viera, Ian McLennan Field tests are underway for a transdisciplinary research team at Boise State. Led by professor of electrical and computer engineering Dr. Sin Ming Loo, and geosciences professor Dr. HP Marshall, the team is working to develop a competitively-priced, self-contained system with the ability to pinpoint infrasound. What on earth is infrasound? Much like the light spectrum which ranges beyond human perception (e.g. infrared), sound is also a spectrum. Infrasound refers to those sound waves with frequencies below the lower limit of human hearing. This month, the team is testing their work at Black's Creek Public Shooting Range. Special thanks to Don Sturtevant and John Keane for their help at the Black's Creek facility.  Spending a sunny day at a shooting range sounds like fun, but these critical tests also provide students with im...

Two faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have each been awarded $75,000 from the Idaho State Board of Education’s Higher Education Research Council incubation fund, which financially supports projects that make technologies from research and development commercially available. Read more >>

Today's electronics, from cell phones to medical instrumentation, require a fairly moderate environment in order to operate at an optimal level. Subject a semiconductor device to an extreme environment (e.g. temperatures above 300° F) such as may be found on an engine, in a power generation facility, or in space, and device performance tends to degrade significantly.  These same devices perform poorly in high radiation environments as well and require radiation “hardening” for survival in space applications.  One possible solution for harsh environments may be v acuum electron transistors, which can operate at very high temperatures and under extreme levels of radiation.  A team of researchers led by Dr. Tayo Akinwande from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying the potential to use vacuum transistors in such environments.   Akinwande's team includes  Drs. Karl Berggren, Tomas Palacios, and Luca Daniels from MIT; Dr. John Ca...

Thanks to a NASA EPSCoR grant, electrical and computer engineering (ECE) faculty Drs. Jim Browning, Nirmala Kandadai, and Harish Subbaraman are teaming up with ECE alumnus and materials science faculty Dr. Dave Estrada, and biochemistry professor Dr. Ken Cornell. The team aims to ascertain the feasibility of plasma-jet application in space with their three-year $700K grant. Read more about the team's project  

The American Chemical Society (ACS) launched its new journal Applied Electronic Materials this year. One of Boise State’s own research teams landed a spot in the very first issue thanks to their novel work on a new type of transistor. “The new transistor opens up an exciting avenue of research,” says Dr. Kris Campbell, an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The featured work describes an optically-gated transistor developed in the Non-Volatile Memory research lab at Boise State University. Campbell’s research team includes undergraduate electrical engineering students Randall Bassine and Jeremy Astle and electrical and computer engineering doctoral student Faisal Kabir. Their unique work has led to a patent for Boise State University and has already been licensed by a company hoping to use the technology in their products. In this work, Dr. Campbell and her team demonstrate that a device comprised of alternating layers of sputtered amorphous c...

Engineering researchers Harish Subbaraman, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, and David Estrada, an assistant professor of material science and engineering, are working to improve upon existing nanomanufacturing technology.  Currently, highly-specialized printers are needed to print nanomaterials that measure as little as one-billionth of a meter across. These additive manufacturing techniques rely on the use of specialized nozzles that deposit tiny amounts of material. Unfortunately, these special nozzles routinely clog. “Say, for instance, you want to print electronics using nanomaterials, create semiconductors that are three atoms thick, or lay down graphene, which is just one atom thick. These materials cannot reliably be printed with today’s state-of-the-art equipment because the nozzle clogs,” Estrada explained. “Our new technique could overcome that.”   Subbaraman adds that “new nozzle-free printing techniques will enable a broader selection ...

Dr. Hao Chen, an Associate Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department has received a research award from the Air Force Research Lab to explore cybersecurity attacks on radar system performance. Chen's aim is to develop a signal processing framework which would aid in analyzing system failures.