Two companies spun-off from ECE research, Fabbrix Inc. and PDF Solutions Inc., are collaborating on a project to refine circuit technology, aiming to substantially exceed silicon performance at 65 nanometers and below. Fabbrix was founded by Larry Pillegi, Tanoto Professor of ECE; Director, CSSI. Andrzej Strojwas, Keithley Professor of ECE, co-founded PDF Solutions.

ECE Department Head T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger speaks about Carnegie Mellon's new Center for Memory Intensive Self-Configuring Integrated Circuits (MISC IC), explaining the technology that will power a new class of intelligent, self-repairing nanoscale chips. He also reviews his research on optical devices.

Carnegie Mellon's new Center for Memory Intensive Self-Configuring Integrated Circuits (MISC IC) is announced in this article. Funded by a six-year, $4.2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers will create the next generation of chips that can reconfigure themselves for new functionality.

Associate ECE Professor Diana Marculescu comments on the technology used in new electronic textiles that have lights to reflect our mood. The concept may one day help the elderly in assisted living situations, by monitoring their physiology.

ECE Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula spent a week in Australia collaborating with researchers at RMIT University. "Carnegie Mellon is ranked number one in the world for information technology," Jiankun Hu, a senior lecturer at RMIT, said in their online news. "And Professor Kumar is the guru of biometrics."

Jatras Professor of ECE Rob Rutenbar is working to develop a computer chip that can understand and process speech faster than in real-time, much improving upon today's software speech-recognition technology. His research has applications for improving national security, cell phones, DVDs, and other media.

ECE faculty member Priya Narasimhan's Trinetra project helps the visually impaired to "read" project labels and may let them track a bus' arrival. She formed her research team with Carnegie Mellon graduate students Patrick Lanigan, Aaron Paulos, and Andrew Williams, as well as systems administrator Dan Rossi, mentor and blind user of Trinetra.

ECE faculty members Vijayakumar Bhagavatula and Marios Savvides summarize their research on correlation pattern recognition for biometrics in this article. Savvides, a session chair at the last SPIE Defense and Security Symposium, also considers the challenges of their work in a video interview (Windows Media | QuickTime).

"James D. Meindl caught the low-power semiconductor wave when it was barely a ripple and brought generations of graduate students along for an exciting ride," reads the introduction to the cover story of this month's IEEE Spectrum. Meindl earned his B.S. ('55), M.S. ('56), and Ph.D. ('58) degrees in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

ECE students Mark Pimentel, Gradon Kam, and Edna Lau's health care software project was featured on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Health section. The team placed in the final round of Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition in Seattle and also won the David Tuma Laboratory Project Award at the ECE Diploma Ceremony.

ECE Department Head Ed Schlesinger is interviewed about the wireless piggybacking phenomena, where users pick up signals from someone else's computer router.

Carnegie Mellon CyLab researchers Vijayakumar Bhagavatula and Marios Savvides are featured in an article discussing the new Registered Traveler program, which will allow frequent fliers to move through security quickly with cards that store their biometric information, such as fingerprints or iris scans.

In a Morning Edition broadcast about making cell phones more polite, ECE faculty member Daniel Siewiorek describes eWatch, a context aware sensing and notification platform developed in the Rapid Prototyping of Computer Systems course he co-taught with colleague Asim Smailagic two years ago.