Career Projects

NIAN SUN

The objective of this CAREER award is to investigate novel magnetoelectric composite films and explore their applications in integrated RF and microwave magnetoelectric devices. The approach is to use the spin spray plating, which has been demonstrated to produce high quality microwave ferrite films at low temperatures and at a low cost. This project proposes to investigate novel spin-spray synthesis methods for magnetoelectric films at a low temperature of 80~90°C, characterize them at different length scales and across different frequency bands, and explore their applications in novel integrated RF and microwave magnetoelectric devices. This project will lead to a whole new area of spin-spray deposited magnetoelectric films and novel integrated tunable magnetoelectric devices critical for RF/microwave integrated circuits. Spin-spray deposited magnetoelectric films will lead to new functionalities on integrated circuits that ferroelectric or magnetic materials alone do not possess, and will have great impacts on many industries and on society.

MEHDI BARADARAN TAHOORI

One of the Major challenges for nanotechnologies is reliability. Nanoscale devices are more likely to fail, both at the manufacturing and during the operating lifetime, compared to traditional devices used in today's chips.

This project investigates techniques to provide defect and fault tolerance in the presence of high defect densities. Defect tolerance, to improve the manufacturing yield, and fault tolerance, to ensure the lifetime reliability, are integrated in the design methodologies for crossbar nano-architectures. The proposed built-in defect and fault tolerance will automatically adapt to the level of manufacturing and runtime defects, making them optimal for a wide range of fabrication processes, operation environments, and applications.

EDWIN MARENGO

This project is about the study of wave-based systems, their signals, and processing. This research will be carried out within the particular and comparative framework provided by two powerful signal processing approaches: compressive sensing and signal subspace methods. Compressive sensing is emerging as a promising new technology to simultaneously and non-adaptively sample and compress sparse signals. This approach enables unprecedented signal processing capabilities with limited data. Signal subspace methods form a broad class of super-resolution approaches whose applicability to imaging of complex targets has been studied extensively by our group at Northeastern. The aim of the project is to study the nascent compressive sensing approach and the better established signal subspace approach in a synergistic framework motivated by open problems in active detection and super-resolution imaging. The program will have an experimental validation component in the form of an active optical compressive sensing testbed.

The testbed will be multi-purpose, in that it will be used for target detection, imaging and wireless communications. The testbed will also be a tool for active and hands-on learning activities impacting the specific educational activities of this proposal which emphasize undergraduate research. The results on compressive sensing and signal-subspace-based imaging deriving from this project will dramatically impact biomedical imaging, homeland security sensing, nondestructive testing, and other areas, because they will enable better detection and super-resolution imaging performance with limited data in comparison with existing approaches.