ECE Awards Round Up: May 2018

Left to right: Utkarsh Patel, Shashwat Sharma, Shunchuan Yang, Professor Sean V. Hum, and Professor Piero Triverio.
Left to right: Utkarsh Patel, Shashwat Sharma, Shunchuan Yang, Professor Sean V. Hum, and Professor Piero Triverio.

Patel, Sharma, Yang, Hum and Triverio win Best Paper award at the 26th IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS)

ECE PhD candidates Utkarsh Patel and Shashwat Sharma and then post-doctoral fellow Shunchuan Yang, supervised by Professor Sean V. Hum and Professor Piero Triverio, won the Best Paper Award at the 26th IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS). Held October 15-18, 2017 in San Jose, California EPEPS is a premier international conference focussing on advanced and emerging issues in electrical modeling, analysis and design of electronic interconnections, packages and systems.

The winning paper, “Full-Wave Electromagnetic Characterization of 3D Interconnects Using a Surface Integral Formulation” presented a fast technique to model electromagnetic phenomena in high-speed integrated circuits. The new method is well suited for the design of upcoming computer processors and graphic cards, and was developed in collaboration with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Professor Ding Yuan in front of whiteboard
Professor Ding Yuan

Yuan receives 2018 McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction

Professor Ding Yuan was announced as the 2018 recipient of the McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction. Established in 1907 by Aeneas McCharles, the prize was re-instated in 2007 as an award for exceptional performance and distinction in early career research on the part of a pre-tenure member of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. Yuan is the fifth recipient of the McCharles Prize and the third recipient from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE).

Yuan joined ECE as an assistant professor in January 2013. His research is in systems software with a focus on reliability and performance in large system-level software. He received a NetApp Faculty Fellowship Award in 2013 and 2016, which recognizes academics who make significant contributions to the storage and data management industry. “I’ve always felt that every research project should have measurable impact and endeavour to make a difference in society,” says Yuan. “So to be recognized with the McCharles Prize is very gratifying for both me and for my research group — I’m humbled by the honour.”

Left to right: Professor Ali H. Sayed (IEEE Signal processing Society President), Professor Wei Yu, and Foad Sohrabi.

Yu and Sohrabi win IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award

Foad Sohrabi (ECE PhD 1T8) and Professor Wei Yu won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. The Best Paper Award is given annually, chosen from papers published in one of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s transactions or journals in the past five years. The award was presented to Yu and Sohrabi by Society President, Professor Ali H. Sayed, at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), held in Calgary.

The winning paper, titled “Hybrid Digital and Analog Beamforming Design for Large-Scale Antenna Arrays” addresses the challenge of hardware limitation in the implementation of massive MIMO systems for wireless cellular networks. The paper considers a hybrid beamforming architecture in which the overall beamformer consists of a low-dimensional digital beamformer followed by an RF beamformer implemented using analog phase shifters. The proposed architecture can approach the performance of a fully digital scheme with much fewer number of RF chains. “It is a timely contribution on a topic that will continue to attract research interest in the foreseeable future,” says Yu.

More information:
Jessica MacInnis
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; jessica.macinnis@utoronto.ca