Posted March 7, 2012 Atlanta, GA
Madhavan Swaminathan won a Best Paper Award at DesignCon 2012, held January 30-February 2 in Santa Clara, Calif. A professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, Dr. Swaminathan shares this award with his recently graduated Ph.D. student Suzanne Huh, who now works at Intel.
Their paper, "Are Power Planes Necessary for High Speed Signaling?," took top honors in the Power and RF Design category. Most electronic packages and printed circuit boards today contain power planes which cause resonances and excessive jitter in a high speed signaling environment. The bad effects of power planes are often mitigated using decoupling capacitors. For the first time, this paper shows the use of transmission lines to supply power with minimum power supply noise and jitter. The findings of this paper, which resulted from Dr. Huh's Ph.D. thesis, could have far reaching consequences in real world applications. These results provide a path towards using fewer layers for signaling, less capacitors, and a possibility for simplifying the design process, leading to low cost solutions.
About the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is one of eight schools and departments in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top 10 of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Over 2,500 students are enrolled in the School’s graduate and undergraduate programs, and in the last academic year, 723 degrees were awarded.
Over 110 ECE faculty members are involved in 11 areas of research, education, and commercialization – bioengineering, computer systems and software, digital signal processing, electric power, electromagnetics, electronic design and applications, microsystems, optics and photonics, systems and controls, telecommunications, and VLSI systems and digital design.
About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Business, and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
