ECE CIRCUIT BOARD

UMD Electrical and Computer Engineering

271 MWAH, 1023 University Drive

Duluth, MN 55812

TELEPHONE: 218-726-6147

F AX: 218-726-7267

http://www.d.umn.edu/ece/

ece@d.umn.edu

Editor: Stanley G. Burns

Spring 2007

GREETINGS FROM STAN BURNS

PROFESSOR AND HEAD

It is my pleasure to again update you on the latest Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering activities. Our faculty and students have been very active in all aspects of our educational mission.

We have an excellent faculty team dedicated to help students accomplish their goals. Our faculty have a wide range of teaching, research, and consulting experience. We will highlight some of the faculty activities in this newsletter and additional faculty in subsequent newsletters Our students work closely in the classroom and laboratory with CHRIS CARROLL (microprocessors and embedded systems), FERNANDO RIOS-GUTIERREZ (instrumentation and signal processing), MOHAMMED HASAN (electromagnetics and signal processing), IMRAN HAYEE (communications systems and optical communications), TAEK KWON (transportation and computer networks), SCOTT NORR (power systems and circuits), MARIAN STACHOWICZ (fuzzy logic and advanced software) , HUA TANG (analog VLSI design)and JIANN-SHIOU YANG, (control systems). My interests are in microelectronics, analog circuits, and instrumentation. Two temporary Assistant Professors PAUL WEBER and LEE ZIMMERMAN, joined our ranks this year to support our teaching mission.

HELEN HASE is the new ECE Executive Secretary.

With support from the Student Technology Fee, we have upgraded our computers and instrumentation in several of our laboratories. This upgrading is a never-ending responsibility in order to insure our students have the best state-of-the art equipment possible to support their education.

I know you will share my pride in the accomplishments of our students; of which samples are highlighted in this newsletter. Please take an opportunity to visit the Department the next time you are passing through Duluth.

Also please take an opportunity to let the ECE Department know what you are doing. Please send information to the Department via e-mail, snail-mail, or the Department WEB interface.

IN MEMORIUM

DR. NAZMI SHEHADEH , Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a recognized expert in communications systems and radio signal propagation, died February 20 in Larchmont, New York. Nazmi died at home in the arms of his wife, Mary Shehadeh, with his family by his side. He was 70. The cause was complications

related to colon cancer.

Dr. Shehadeh was born in Palestine in October 1936 and emigrated from Jordan to the United States in 1961. Dr. Nazmi Shehadeh graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1964.  He went on to earn Master of Science and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Iowa in 1965 and 1967 respectively.   After graduation, he held several faculty positions at the College of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia and the University of Houston and including serving as the Chair of the Electronics Department at the Higher Institute of Electronics in Libya.  He was a recognized expert in communications systems and radio signal propagation and was very active in engineering professional societies.  He joined the faculty as a Professor of the nascent Computer Engineering Department at the University of  Minnesota Duluth in 1986 and was appointed its Department Head in 1987; a position he held until 1998.  He guided the transition from Computer Engineering to a well-recognized Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1994.  Nazmi retired from the University of Minnesota Duluth Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2003 to be closer to his children and grandchildren.  He was well respected  as a teacher, scholar, advisor, and mentor by students, colleagues,

He is survived by Mary, his wife of 42 years who is retired from the faculty of the Department of Psychology of the College of St. Scholastica; his mother, Nazmia; his sons Samuel Shehadeh, a lawyer with Baker & McKenzie LLP, and Dr. Ramsey Shehadeh, an economist with NERA Economic Consulting; five grandchildren; and seven siblings. Dr. Shehadeh battled colon cancer since 1999, most recently with the help of physicians and nurses at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital.

OFFICE STAFF

HELEN HASE joined the ECE Department on Dec 5, 2006, as the new Executive Secretary replacing Carol Skoglund. Helen Hase has been with the University since 1998 both in a working capacity and as a student. She previously worked at UMD’s Natural Resources Research Institute, NRRI.

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FACULTY NEWS

DR. CHRIS CARROLL is spearheading efforts to coordinate engineering activities at UMD with "Project Lead the Way" activities in the Duluth high schools.  Project “Lead the Way” is a national program that attempts to integrate engineering topics into high school curricula to expose high school students to engineering and to inspire some of them to consider careers in engineering.  Two Duluth high schools and one Duluth middle school are already participating in this program, and with Dr. Carroll's help, UMD intends to be an active participant in helping to expand Project “Lead the Way” in Duluth.

Dr. Carroll will attend the 2007 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in June in Honolulu!  He will present a paper, "A Turing Machine for the 21st Century", which details the design of a basic computer model that may become a foundation for some interesting future design labs in ECE 1315 and/or ECE 3341.  While in Hawaii, Dr. Carroll obviously will take in some tourist attractions.  (What a surprise!).

DR. HUA TANG’s research focus is on developing computer aided design methods and tools for system-level design and circuit-level design of analog and mixed-signal systems. Some targeted challenges include process-parameter-variation-aware VLSI circuit design and fast statistical performance analysis techniques. In addition, he is also working on a seed project, sponsored by Northland Advanced Transportation Systems Research Laboratory (NATSRL), to study the feasibility of developing a CMOS processor for vehicle tracking so that the computation time for tracking would be less compared to traditional software based approaches.

Another major topic being worked on, with graduate students, is transistor-level high-performance analog VLSI design, with special interest to address chip-level non-idealities, such as clock jitter and loading effects. MATT WEBB has been a graduate student since Spring 2006. His main research focus is on CMOS transistor-level design of a Delta-Sigma modulator for WCDMA wireless communications. Matt has finished the first version of design in Cadence using a TSMC 0.25 m m process and its simulation predicts that it will meet the design requirements of WCDMA. Matt is now working on a second version to address some of the problems identified in the first version. After the second version, Matt will be working on the layout design so that it can be fabricated through MOSIS. MOSIS is a government sponsored program to support VLSI fabrication for universities.

Dr. Tang also teaches the VLSI class ECE 4311, a senior elective that is open to both seniors and graduate students. The course focuses on transistor-level design of common digital logic gates, registers, modules, arithmetic building blocks and other application specific integrated circuits. The expected output of the course is that students will be able design some complex digital modules with a few thousand transistors. This spring, two representative student final projects were the design of an 8-bit central processing unit for computer chip applications and butterfly unit of Fast Fourier Transform algorithm for signal processing applications. All projects were designed using the TSMC 0.25 m m process in CADENCE. CADENCE is one of the most widely-used industrial VLSI

design and simulation software packages.

Layouts for the CPU and FFT System. I am sure you will have no trouble identifying and checking the wiring for each of the thousands of transistors in each layout photograph.

DR. PAUL WEBER attended the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) conference on January 16 th and 17 th in St. Cloud, MN. The conference focused on renewable energy technologies and procedures for projects involving them, as well as building regional and local connections with others interested in such projects. Paul attended sessions on solar energy technologies and small and medium-scale wind energy production in addition to a workshop entitled “Harnessing the Power of Higher Education to Support Local Energy Projects”. Several promising connections were made with members of the greater U of M community at Morris, Crookston and the Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE) as well as Bill Pederson from the MIE department who is currently involved with wind-based energy projects here at UMD.

DR. JIANN-SHIOU YANG, recently had an article titled “Application of the Kalman Filter to the Arterial Travel Time Prediction – A Special Event Case Study,” published in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Control and Intelligent Systems. The MN/DOT project final report titled “A Nonlinear State Space Approach to Arterial Travel Time Prediction”, was also recently published by the MN/DOT’s Office of Research Services. Dr. Yang is currently supervising ECE graduate student MATT LEINES on his thesis of stability control of a five-link biped with underactuated joints, and he is also supervising ECE undergraduate student Y. ZHUANG on his UROP project titled “Precipitation Data Analysis, Modeling and Prediction Using the Time Series Analysis Method”. In addition, ECE graduate SAMUEL RUD gave an oral presentation titled “Infrasound Heart Murmurs Detection”, at the Eleventh Annual UMD Undergraduate Research/Artistic Showcase

MSECE GRADUATE SPENCER STRUNIC

Spencer graduated from Randolph (MN) High School with numerous academic honors. He then earned a BSECE from UMD May 2005 and entered the MSECE graduate program where he continued his undergraduate project collaboration with the Medical School in signal processing of stethoscope auscultation data. He defended his thesis, “Detection and Classification of Cardiac Murmurs Using Segmentation Techniques and Artificial Neural Networks”, December 2006. His Major Advisors (Professors) were Dr. Rocio Alba Flores and Dr. Fernando Rios Gutierrez. Spencer is currently working in the Madison, WI area.

RESEARCH UPDATES

The following is a selection of recent publications. Student authors are in bold font.

• H. Tang, H. Zhang, A. Doboli, " Refinement-based Synthesis of Continuous-time Analog Filters Through Successive Domain Pruning, Plateau Search and Adaptive Sampling”, IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 25, No. 8, pp. 1421-1440, Aug 2006.

• F. Rios-Gutierrez, R. Alba-Flores, "Civil Engagement Projects for Electrical and Computer Engineering Students", Proceedings of the 2006 ASEE Saint Laurence Section Conference, Cornell University, Nov.17-18, 2006.

• S. Strunic , F. Rios-Gutierrez, R. Alba-Flores, G. Nordehn and S. Burns, "Detection and Classification of Cardiac Murmurs using Segmentation Techniques and Artificial Neural Networks", 2007 IEEE Symposium on
  Computational Intelligence and Data Mining, CIDM 2007, April 1-5, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii.

• M. Webb, H. Tang, “Modeling Continuous-time Delta Sigma Modulators in MATLAB SIMULINK for System-level Simulation and Specification Translation”, WSEAS Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Issue 12, Vol. 5, pp. 1760-1767, Dec 2006.

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY PROGRAM (UROP)

ECE students continue to be very successful in securing grants for undergraduate research projects. UROP offers financial awards to undergraduates for research, scholarly, or creative projects undertaken in partnership with a faculty member. UROP affords undergraduates the unique educational experience of collaborating with a faculty member on the design and implementation of a project. At the same time, faculty have the opportunity to work closely with students and receive valuable assistance with their own research or professional activity. UROP adds new dimension to the undergraduate experience. It encourages students to conduct research and pursue academic interests outside of their regular courses by employing them to work on special projects.

The projects are wide ranging and reflect the diversity and expertise of both students and faculty interests. For example there is the project:

“Modeling of the Human Body Using a Generalized Stochastic Petri Net”, by BUDDHIKA RUWAN MAITIPE, mentored by DR. PAUL WEBER

The project goals are to generate a stochastic model of the human body in a similar manner as the analysis of a fault-tolerant electro-mechanical system. The goals are to gain insight into the effectiveness of such modeling and to determine its usefulness in objectifying the health assessment of a person. Such analysis could enable doctors to give more accurate information to patients when facing decisions such as whether to perform surgery by examining the likely life expectancy and quality of life given the current health of individual organs and systems of a person. The project is to be completed by May 2007.

SENIOR DESIGN

ECE students either participate in a team-project under the mentoring a one or more faculty or participate in a team project under the aegis of the Senior Design Workshop whose focus changes with different offerings. The focus this year was to apply Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to specific problems as described below. SCOTT NORR and FERNANDO RIOS GUTIERREZ were the faculty mentors.

One example of a team project with industrial interest, Minnesota Power, is a “Controller to Integrate Hydrogen Fuel Cells with Wind Turbine Generation”. The design team included JESSE PHILLIPS, QUYEN KIEU, and CALEB SIFFRING. They developed a method to improve the availability of electricity from a wind turbine generator (WTG). The result of their research is a programmable logic controller (PLC) based control system that will operate a hydrogen fuel cell in tandem with the WTG. The result is a stable supply of electricity from the combined system. Under windy conditions, the controller allows the WTG to send some power to the grid, but uses the excess to electrolyze water into hydrogen. Under low wind conditions, the controller sends the hydrogen to the fuel cell to make the additional electricity needed to maintain a steady output.

Ongoing Design Workshop projects include:

“Reservoir Gate Automation, Minnesota Power” with team members, CHARLES HAUPERT, BASI

ANWANAKAK, EDWARD SIMON, and JASON

WOLLAK. They areworking with ANDREW REMUS of Minnesota Power and a UMD ECE alumnus, to implement a PLC-based automation scheme at a reservoir gate on MP’s hydro system. The team will perform the design and specification of the system, allowing the control of a reservoir gate at Birch Lake from the operations center at Thomson Hydro Station. Design aspects include control of the gate motor, security for the control building, remote and local control screens via touch panel display.

MATTHEW BIENIEK, RYAN WILMOT , NATHAN WIRKKULA, and SAM NTEKPE are working on the project, “Power Plant Educational Display for Minnesota Power”. Again working with ANDREW REMUS, they are designing and constructing a portable educational display. The display will model the operation of an electric power plant. The display will be automated using an Allen-Bradley L61 Process Automation Controller (PAC), allowing interaction with the display through a touch panel control screen.

Another PLC-based ongoing project is “Metering Automation for the School of Medicine, UMD” with team members ANDREW GRZESKOWIAK, JOEN CHU, and JOSHUA BARRETT. The team is working with Doug McKercher and John Rashid of UMD-Facilities Management to automate the gathering of meter information from the School of Medicine on campus. Students will design and specify an Eaton PLC based system to read meter information on the use of Steam, Domestic Water, Natural Gas and Compressed Air. The system will deliver the readings to the campus internet where they can be read from any workstation.

IEEE STUDENT BRANCH

UMD's IEEE Student Branch is a student organization that gives Electrical and Computer Engineering students an opportunity to participate in numerous activities throughout the school year.  This semester, the branch will go on joint "field trips" with the Arrowhead Section of IEEE to the Tower-Soudan Mines, and Hunt Technologies.  IEEE also sponsors other fun activities such as Game Day and bowling. Each semester, IEEE organizes a Student-Faculty Feedback Forum to discuss possible curriculum and departmental improvements. Later this semester the student branch will be hosting an outdoor picnic where students and faculty can meet and enjoy free food. Most of the on-campus events and meetings are held in MWAH 102 which the IEEE manages.

The IEEE Student Branch can be contacted through emailing DERRICK KEFFELER (President) at keffe006@d.umn.edu or SCOTT NORR (Advisor) at snorr@d.umn.edu, or viewing the Student Branch’s website through the ECE Department WEB page.

Top Row:

JASON STAAB, SCOTT KLAR, DERRICK KEFFELER, MATT ROBERTS, J. D. HOVERMAN, MIKE ARNDT

Bottom Row:

CHRIS FRERICKS, CARRIE LARSEN, KEVIN KELLER, DON HONERBRINK

2007 CLEAN SNOWMOBILE CHALLENGE

Clean Snowmobile Challenge TM is an intercollegiate engineering design competition that challenges engineering students to re-engineer an existing snowmobile for improved emissions and noise while maintaining or improving the performance characteristics of the original snowmobile. The modified snowmobiles are also expected to be cost-effective. The competition is sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Following last year’s successes, students from the Departments of Electrical and Computer

Engineering and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering modified mechanical and electrical systems of a snowmobile, generously donated by Polaris Corporation to initially support the 2006 CSC.

Other schools competing include SUNY-Buffalo, Clarkson University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Maine, Kettering University, Michigan Tech University, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Minnesota State University – Mankato, University of Idaho, McGill University, South Dakota School of Mines, and Utah State University.

The UMD CSC Team showing off their “sled” at the Copper Country Mall in Houghton. The 2007 CSC was from 19-24 March at the Keweenaw Research Center.

From Left to Right:

KEVIN STAGMAN, CHRIS CALLENDER, NATE WARFIELD, PATRICK SHAVER, RYAN FISCHER, TONY WELLS, NOLAN VANEPPS, DEREK PEDERSON, DEREK, ZIMNEY, BRAD AHO

Photograph Copyright Ó KRC/MTU

UMD ANNOUNCES REACHING HIGHER SCHOLARSHIP INITIATIVE

Since 1998, each student body has successively been the largest in UMD’s history, and our documented academic excellence has been rising right along with it. But as we educate the next generation that has an inspiring passion to learn, we are aware of a critical shortfall; the need for more scholarships.

Currently, ECE is able to provide about 15 scholarships a year. Most of these are funded by annual gifts from local businesses. We only have one endowed permanent scholarship. Through the Reaching Higher Scholarship Initiative we hope to increase this number. The University has committed institutional funds to match the payout of the new endowed scholarships. For example, if $1,000 is being awarded from a new endowed scholarship fund, UMD will match that with an additional $1,000. And that doubles the chances for success of our students.

• Any gift (or pledge payable over up to 5 years) of $10,000 or more that meets program qualifications is eligible for the match.
• Gifts are used to create an endowment fund for UMD students.
• A little less than five percent of the fund’s market value is paid out annually to fund the scholarship. Each year, UMD will match this payout to double the impact of the gift.
• YOU CAN DESIGNATE SPECIFICALLY FOR AN ECE STUDENT!!!

The Reaching Higher Scholarship Initiative is a great opportunity for donors to double the impact of their giving and truly help students achieve their educational goals.

For more information about the Reaching Higher Scholarship Initiative please contact Tricia Bunten, Development Director for the College of Science and Engineering, at 218-726-6995 or toll-free at 1-866-999-6995 or email tbunten@d.umn.edu.

If you would like to make a donation to support the efforts of the ECE Department and/or for scholarships , you may send your contributions to:

Ms. Tricia Bunten

UMD/CSE Development Director

148 Engineering Building

1303 Ordean Court

Duluth , MN 55812-3025

Please note “ECE Department” on your check.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!!!

ECE CONTACT INFORMATION

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Minnesota Duluth

271 MWAH, 1023 University Drive

Duluth , MN 55812

Telephone: 218-726-6147

Fax: 218-726-7267

Email: ece@d.umn.edu

Web Site: http://www.d.umn.edu/ece/

ECE Department Head, and M.S.E.C.E. Program

Director of Graduate Studies

Dr. Stanley G. Burns

218-726-7506

sburns@d.umn.edu

Information about the MSECE Degree Program at:

http://www.d.umn.edu/ece/publications/handbook/msece/msece.htm