Swenson College of Science & Engineering

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Featured Faculty: Hua Tang

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Interests: analog, digital and mixed-signal circuit design, very large scaled integrated (VLSI) circuit design, computer aided design (CAD), signal processing and intelligent transportation systems Courses Taught: ECE 2212 Electronics I, ECE3235 Electronics II, ECE4311 Design of VLSI Circuits (a new course ECE5211 Advanced Analog Integrated Circuit Design will be taught soon) Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~htang/

Dr. Tang’s research in the past five years mainly focuses on three areas. One area of the research is to design high-performance Delta-Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converters for wireless applications, such as WCDMA and wireless LAN. A technique has also been developed to reduce clock jitter effects in Continuous-time Delta-Sigma Converters. The designed Converters have been fabricated.

A second area of research is to develop efficient hardware architectures for signal processing applications. For newest H.264/AVC video coding standards, a low-power hardware architecture has been developed for Variable Block Size Motion Estimation.

Also, for speech recognition devices to be used in intelligent toys, robots and language study machines, a simple hardware architecture with multiple processing elements was conceived that can achieve lowest energy consumption compared to previous works. These hardware architectures have been implemented in both FPGA and ASIC.

Another more recent area of research is intelligent transportation systems. One project is to develop a hardware-assisted video system for real-time vehicle detection and merging assistance. Complex vehicle detection algorithms have been implemented in custom-designed hardware to speed up the processing. The other project is to design new vehicle tracking algorithms for traffic performance measurements in roundabouts and intersections.