PULLMAN – Partha Pratim Pande, assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award to design a tiny and sophisticated wireless communications system – all on an integrated circuit that measures only about 20 millimeters on each side.
Pande’s award is the third CAREER Award for the faculty members in the College of Engineering and Architecture, the first time that any college at WSU has received three such awards in one year. The other CAREER award winners announced earlier this year are Deuk Heo, assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Marc Beutel, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
With the five-year, $450,000 award, Pande and his research group are working to develop a wireless network on a multicore computer chip. With hundreds of computer processors on present-day integrated circuits, the conventional metal wires that connect them have become an increasing problem. The traditional metal wire-based communication between two distant cores in a single chip gives rise to high latency and energy dissipation.
Pande and his collaborators, including Alireza Nojeh, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, and Benjamin Belzer, associate professor in WSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, are working to use carbon nanotubes as antennae for a tiny wireless world on the chips. Similar to the cell phone towers one sees at the macroscale, carbon nanotubes have been shown to be able to radiate signals. The challenge, as is the case in the macro-world of cell phone towers, is to make sure that the signals work consistently and remain reliable.
The researchers will design their wireless system and then eventually send their design to a fabrication facility, where a prototype chip will be built.
The researchers hope that the work will lead to the improved efficiency of multicore chips. From consumer multimedia to image processing to defense applications, new designs containing large numbers of embedded cores are emerging. These diverse applications will benefit from the proposed on-chip communication architecture. The work also has important applications in research that requires data-intensive computing, such as bioinformatics or astrophysics.
According to the NSF website, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers that agency’s most prestigious awards for junior faculty for outstanding research and integrated education and research efforts.
Pande holds a doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of British Columbia, a master’s degree in computer science from National University of Singapore, and a bachelor’s degree from University of Calcutta, India.
