November 9, 2021
Are Homemade CPUs Alibaba’s Bid For Independence?

China has taken another step toward semiconductor independence with Alibaba announcing the design of a 5-nanometer technology server chip that is based on Arm Ltd.’s latest instruction set architecture. But, impressive as that feat is, an even more significant chip design development by the Chinese tech giant may be making available the source code to a RISC-V CPU core its own engineers designed. This means other companies can use it in their own processor designs—and escape architecture license fees. (The company made both announcements at its annual cloud convention in its home city of Hangzhou last month.)
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November 4, 2021
Dr. Pamela Abshire is the PI for a five-year grant in NSF’s Emerging Frontiers

Professor Pamela Abshire (ECE/ISR) is the principal investigator and ISR-affiliated Associate Professor Timothy Horiuchi (ECE) and Professor Ricardo Araneda (Biology) are the co-PIs for Learning the Rules of Neuronal Learning, a five-year grant in NSF’s Emerging Frontiers “Understanding the Rules of Learning” program. The project will begin Jan. 1, 2022. The researchers will bring together recent technological advances in patterning, electrical recording, optical stimulation, and genetic manipulation of neurons to study how to nurture a healthy culture of neurons while continuously observing and stimulating them at fine scale. They hope to uncover how the individual parts of a single neuron contribute to the overall learning and computation of the neural network.
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November 2, 2021
Biofilm-fighting catheter insert research named ‘featured article’ in IEEE TBME

Published research by University of Maryland scientists on a novel system to combat biofilm in urinary catheters has been named a featured article for November by IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME). The paper also has led to a recent patent application. The authors are alum Ryan Huiszoon (BIOE Ph.D. 2020), a senior process engineer at Facebook Reality Labs; alum Sangwook Chu (ECE Ph.D. 2018), a process engineer at Applied Materials; ECE Ph.D. students Jinjing Han and Justin Stine; UMD Research Associate Luke Beardslee; and Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR). Huiszoon, Chu, Han and Stine are advisees of Dr. Ghodssi. “Integrated System for Bacterial Detection and Biofilm Treatment on Indwelling Urinary Catheters” represents substantial progress on a flexible biofilm detection and treatment system—UMD research that originally began in 2007.
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November 1, 2021
Alum Faheng Zang joins Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Alum Faheng Zang (ECE Ph.D. 2016), a former student of Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR), has joined the Department of Micro-Nano Electronics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as a tenure-track associate professor. He will continue his work in microsystems, microsensors and 3D micro- and nanostructures and explore opportunities to create new nanostructures and new fabrication methods for sensing and energy applications.
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October 4, 2021
ISR honors Ashley Chapin in awards ceremony

Ashley Chapin is a Ph.D. student of Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR) and is a part of the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory (MSAL). Her multidisciplinary work on neuroscience systems integration, along with her leadership and mentorship positions, has earned her the George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award.
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September 14, 2021
Fischell Fellowship advances visiting assistant professor’s work

Santiago Botasini, a visiting assistant professor working in Professor Reza Ghodssi’s (ECE/ISR) MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory (MSAL), has been awarded one of the inaugural Fischell Young Investigator Fellowships. The award will enable Botasini to further his research on ingestible devices, sensors, and human gut microbiome-to-neuron communication.
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August 18, 2021
Alum Thomas Winkler joins Technische Universität Braunschweig

University of Maryland and BIOE alum, Thomas Winkler, has taken a new position at the Technische Universität Braunschweig where he is the head of his own junior research group, the μ4Life – Microsystems for Life Sciences. This position is akin to an assistant professorship. Winkler’s laboratory uses microsystems tools to solve life science challenges and he is currently advising two Ph.D. students.
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August 13, 2021
Alum Nima Ghalichechian joins Georgia Tech faculty

University of Maryland and ECE alum, Nima Ghalichechian, has joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. He is the principal investigator of the mmWave Antennas and Arrays Laboratory, where he will research applied electromagnetics.
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August 12, 2021
Measuring the ‘suckiness’ of invasive sea lampreys

The invasive sea lamprey has threatened native species in the Great Lakes for decades. University of Maryland and ECE/ISR alum, Xiaobo Tan, and his colleagues are developing a “smart” sensing panel to determine the sea lamprey’s suction pressure dynamics to investigate a way to control the invasive species. The Michigan State University team has published a paper, “Measurement of suction pressure dynamics of sea lampreys, Petromyzon marinus,” explaining their research.
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July 1, 2021
Three Engineers Among 2021-2022 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers

Three faculty members in the A. James Clark School of Engineering have been selected as 2021–2022 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers by the University of Maryland (UMD). One of these recipients is Dr. Pamela Abshire, a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research. The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program, established in 1978, honors a small number of senior faculty who have demonstrated outstanding success in both scholarly accomplishment and excellence in teaching. Distinguished Scholar-Teachers make a public presentation on a topic within their scholarly discipline and receive an honorarium to support their professional activities. View the schedule of lectures from awardees.
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June 17, 2021
Alum develops bioelectric effect toothbrush

A Clark School of Engineering alum has transferred his Ph.D. research on the bioelectric effect into a pioneering consumer product that improves mouth and gum health. Young Wook Kim (ECE Ph.D. 2014) is the founder of ProxiHealthcare Inc., which manufactures the new TROMATZ toothbrush. First available in South Korea, the toothbrush employs the bioelectric effect to effectively attack the mouth’s plaque and tartar biofilms. It has received FDA and FCC approval in the United States and is available for purchase on Amazon.
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May 06, 2021
New chip milestone offers greater efficiency and performance

IBM has become the first in the world to introduce a 2-nanometer (nm) node chip. IBM claims this new chip will improve performance by 45 percent using the same amount of power, or use 75 percent less energy while maintaining the same performance level, as today’s 7 nm-based chips. To give some sense of scale, with 2-nm technology, IBM could put 50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail.

The foundation of the chip is nanosheet technology in which each transistor is made up of three stacked horizontal sheets of silicon, each only a few nanometers thick and completely surrounded by a gate. Nanosheet technology is poised to replace so-called FinFet technology named for the fin-like ridges of current-carrying silicon that project from the chip’s surface. The life expectancy of FinFet has been more or less set at the 7-nm node. If it were to go any smaller, transistors would become difficult to switch off: Electrons would leak out, even with the three-sided gates.
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December 08, 2020
Horiuchi collaborates on UW ‘Smellicopter’ Drone Project that Utilizes a Live Moth Antenna
Led by graduate student Melanie Anderson at the University of Washington (supported by an Air Force Center of Excellence on ‘Nature-Inspired Flight Technologies and Ideas’ or ‘NIFTI’ Grant) a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research team has developed the “Smellicopter,” an autonomous drone that uses a live antenna from a moth to navigate toward specific odors. Using other commercial sensors, Smellicopter also can sense and avoid obstacles as it travels through the air. The results were recently published in the journal IOP Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Horiuchi contributed to the subsystem that enables orientation of the vehicle in the direction of the wind.

Timothy Horiuchi is a co-author on the research published in IOP Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
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November 23, 2020
Lemonade from lemons: Despite COVID-19 sidelining of MEMS showcase, proceedings and papers quickly published

The 20th Solid-State Sensors, Actuators, and Microsystems Hilton Head Workshop was scheduled for May 31–June 4, 2020, at the Sonesta Resort on Hilton Head Island, S.C., with Mina Rais-Zadeh of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as general chair, University of Maryland Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR) as technical program chair, and Ryan Sochol (ME) on the Technical Program Committee. Unfortunately, like most academic conferences in the spring of 2020, it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, papers that would have been presented at this workshop have been gathered into a special issue of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems. IEEE JMEMS Special Proceeding for the Hilton Head 2020 Workshop was published as Volume 29, Issue 5, in October 2020.
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October 14, 2020
Symptoms all in your head—or in your gut? Maybe a little of both.

Anyone who has ever experienced “butterflies in the stomach” before giving a big presentation won’t be surprised to learn there is an actual physical connection between their gut and their brain. Neuroscientists and medical professionals call this the “gut-brain-axis” (GBA). A better understanding of the GBA could lead to treatments and cures for neurological mood disorders like depression and anxiety, as well as for a range of chronic auto-immune inflammatory diseases like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
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August 26, 2020
Epitaxial Graphene-Based Biosensor Provides Rapid Detection of COVID-19

Assistant Professor Kevin Daniels (ECE/IREAP) and his colleagues, have developed an epitaxial graphene based biosensor that provides rapid detection of COVID-19. The biosensor, created by Daniels, Dr. Soaram Kim of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP), Dr. Heeju Ryu of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Dr. Seo Hyun Kim of the University of Georgia, and Dr. Rachael Myers-Ward of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, tested COVID spike protein ranging from one attogram to one microgram, and can detect COVID spike protein in a few seconds, reuse sensors by simply rinsing in sodium chloride (NaCl), and attain results without sending it off to a lab, unlike the current real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. Although It is the fastest, most reliable and universally used method for diagnosis, RT-PCR requires a ribonucleic acid (RNA) preparation step, causing a decrease in accuracy as well as sensitivity. In addition, it takes over three hours to complete the current diagnosis for COVID-19.
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April 22, 2020
Clark School faculty ‘AIM-HI’ to address major health challenges

Clark School faculty figure prominently in two of the four joint research projects announced on April 22 as part of the new AIM-HI (AI + Medicine for High Impact) program to target major health care challenges. AIM-HI brings together experts in medicine and artificial intelligence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), and is making available up to $1.8 million in funding over three years.

AIM-HI was launched a year ago by Laurie Locascio (pictured), vice president for research at both UMB and UMCP, in partnership with deans from both campuses and with support from the two university presidents.
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February 08, 2020
Alumnus Brendan Hanrahan’s decade of running for medical research

In the past 10 years, alumnus Brendan Hanrahan (MSE Ph.D. 2013) has raised close to $19 million for Neurofibromatosis (NF) research through Cupid’s Charity, a recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit. With Chad Leathers and Bobby Gill, Hanrahan founded the organization while a University of Maryland graduate student.

The most recognizable event associated with the charity is “Cupid’s Undie Run,” which began in Washington, D.C. in 2010, during the infamous “Snowmageddon” blizzard. The Undie Run is an all-day event that includes a run of about a mile through the city streets in underwear and costumes, followed by an epic dance party. All net proceeds from Cupid’s Undie Run funds research through the Children’s Tumor Foundation, the world’s leader in NF research.

The event has grown over the years; this year 38 cities are participating throughout the month of February. The D.C. event was held on Feb. 8.
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November 12, 2019
Professor Iliadis and Graduate Student Chung present a Novel IC CMOS Sensor for Remote RF Sensing at DTC 2019

Professor Agis Iliadis (ECE) and graduate student Jooik Chung presented “A Novel IC CMOS Sensor for Remote RF Sensing” at the Defense Techconnect (DTC) Innovation Summit and Expo on October 8 at the National Harbor, Maryland. Their work deals with the rich RF spectrum of mobile communications, Wi-Fi, Radar, and digital data systems, and interference threats that are very difficult to detect and identify. These RF interference signals can threaten the cybersecurity of protected defense or data systems and can breach the integrity of the system and introduce malware, which opens the door for serious data breaches if not detected and identified. The need for a sensor for detection and identification of the origin and legitimacy of such RF signals is of paramount importance. At the conference, Iliadis and Chung presented a fully integrated CMOS chip with increased sensitivity coupled with micro-patch antennas on-chip for the detection of RF interference signals, evaluating their origin, directionality, distance, and signature, to protect critical defense systems from cyber and other threats. Their work generated interest from many companies and agencies.
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October 28, 2019
Goldsman and colleagues awarded US Patent for SiC-integrated circuit active photodetector

SR-affiliated Professor Neil Goldsman (ECE) and his colleagues were issued U.S. Patent No. 10,446,592 on Oct. 15, 2019 for “silicon carbide integrated circuit active photodetector,” a device that provides accurate, reliable measurement of ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Co-inventors on the patent are Akin Akturk, Zeynep Dilli, Brendan Cusack and Michael Gross. The patent is assigned to CoolCAD Electronics, LLC, a College Park company founded by Goldsman and Akturk for CAD and custom electronics design. The company carries out R&D projects on a wide cross-section of electronics, including semiconductor device modeling and design, integrated circuit modeling and design, and printed circuit board or full electronic system modeling and design.
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