College of Engineering adds new Strategic Research Initiative projects

To further grow its research program and support collaboration in new and emerging areas, the College of Engineering has selected five new projects for funding through its the Strategic Research Initiatives (SRI) program for 2013.

The intent of the SRI program, which was initiated in Spring 2012, is to place Illinois in a clear leadership position in promising new and growing areas of engineering research. SRI supports both late- and early-stage research through strategic investment in the form of seed funding. Late-stage funding supports projects that develop engineering leadership by collecting and building on existing capabilities in units or groups to form new interdisciplinary focus areas or centers. Early stage funding supports the initiation and exploration of promising interdisciplinary research.

Two late-stage projects were selected for SRI funding:

Wide-Bandgap (WBG) Power Electronics Research Initiative toward a Center of Excellence and Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Kyekyoon (Kevin) Kim (PI), Elyse Rosenbaum, and Philip T. Krein, electrical and computer engineering

Wide band gap (WBG) semiconductors are recognized for their potential to revolutionize electric power systems, supporting disruptive changes in power electronics. With applications as diversified as hybrid cars, photovoltaic inverters, lighting, distributed generation, and communications – at voltages ranging widely from a few volts to thousands of volts – WBG power electronics will take on a leading role over the next decade. Building on the investigators’ existing expertise, this project creates a strategic WBG Power Electronics Research Initiative as a preface to establishing a national center for excellence to proactively explore entrepreneurial opportunities and attracting external funding for this growing research sector.


Nonmanufacturing Paradigm Shift from 2D to 3D: Rolled-up Electronic and Photonic Devices and Systems
Xiuling Li (PI), Xiaogang Chen, James J. Coleman, and Jose Schutt-Aine, electrical and computer engineering; Placid Ferreira and K. Jimmy Hsia, mechanical science and engineering; John A. Rogers, materials science and engineering

This project aims to develop a new paradigm – strain induced self-rolled-up 3D architectures – for advanced nano-manufacturing of miniaturized on-chip electronic components for radio frequency and millimeter wave integrated circuits, and vertically integrated photonics. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, the team will develop key technologies for making complex 3D architectures with unprecedented small physical footprint and transformative device concept.

Three early-stage projects were selected for initial SRI funding:

Atomic-Scale Design of Oxide Heterojunctions for Energy Conversion
Elif Ertekin (PI), mechanical science and engineering; Lane Martin and Angus Rockett, materials science and engineering; Ed Seebauer, chemical and biomolecular engineering

To produce vastly improved photocatalysts for solar hydrogen production as well as energy-efficient environmental remediation, researchers are pursuing a transformative approach for designing and synthesizing oxide heterojunctions for photocatalytic (PC) energy conversion devices. Their unique approach combines semiconductor defect engineering to control the concentration and lifetime of photostimulated charge carriers, semiconductor band engineering to control the flow of charge carriers within the photocatalyst, the use of “hot” carriers with greater than thermal energies, and atomic-scale modeling of the free surfaces and solid-solid interfaces to optimize atomic defect injection during synthesis and carrier flow during operation.
 

Optimizing DNA Storage Efficiency via Joint Constrained and Error-Control Coding
Olgica Milenkovic (PI), electrical and computer engineering; Jian Ma, bioengineering; Huimin Zhao, chemical and biomolecular engineering

Researchers are addressing a set of question with potentially far-reaching consequences for the future of DNA storage: What are the ultimate theoretically achievable limits of DNA-based recording techniques? How does one design tailor-made joint constrained and error-control coding methods for DNA media that optimally exploit the properties of the system? In particular, is it possible to design universal coding methods invariant to the technology used for DNA synthesis and sequencing (Illumina versus Roche versus PacBio or some other emerging platform)? Will the constructed coding schemes allow for efficient compression without catastrophic error propagation? How significant will the cost savings ensured by near-optimal coding schemes be? Can one expect the resulting systems to be scalable with the stored file lengths? The team will investigate these questions both from an analytical and an implementation-based point of view—exploring how current design techniques may be improved, while developing new DNA sequence storage paradigms in an experimental setting.
 

Powering Big Data - A Systems Approach to Future Computing Platforms
Robert Pilawa-Podgurski (PI), Philip Krein, Yi Lu, Naresh Shanbhag, electrical and computer engineering and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL); Roy Campbell, computer science and CSL

The goal is to develop a new class of computing and power management hardware, software, and control algorithms that dramatically reduce energy requirements in future datacenters and computers. By seamlessly unifying the intrinsic processes of energy conversion, information conversion, and software organization, the project seeks to transform the design of robust and energy-efficient embedded platforms, computers, and data centers. The patent-pending technology to be explored can reduce energy consumption of computing processes by an order of magnitude or more, overcoming emerging barriers to next-generation computing. 

These newly funded projects are in addition to the six SRI projects that were funded in June 2012.
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Contact: Jennifer T. Bernhard, Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/333-0293.

Writer: Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communication Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.