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Sensitive Yet Tough Photonic Devices Are Now a Reality

June 25, 2025

Sensitive Yet Tough Photonic Devices Are Now a Reality

Engineers have achieved a long-sought milestone in photonics: creating tiny optical devices that are both highly sensitive and durable. This work could lead to a new generation of photonic devices that are not only precise and powerful but also much easier and cheaper to produce at scale. Full Story


2025 Jacobs School Award of Excellence Recipients

June 12, 2025

2025 Jacobs School Award of Excellence Recipients

The Jacobs School of Engineering will celebrate the undergraduate students in the class of 2025 at its annual Ring Ceremony on Friday, June 13. Six students were selected from the nearly 1,500  students receiving bachelor’s degrees from the Jacobs School of Engineering to receive an Award of Excellence from their academic department.   Full Story


Reimagining RFID: UC San Diego Researchers Develop Award-Winning Real-Time, Battery-Free Sensors

June 10, 2025

Reimagining RFID: UC San Diego Researchers Develop Award-Winning Real-Time, Battery-Free Sensors

UC San Diego engineers' award-winning SenSync system turns conventional RFID technology into a reliable sensing platform without using wires or batteries or requiring calibration. Full Story


Electrical Engineer Peter Asbeck is Powering 6G

May 14, 2025

Electrical Engineer Peter Asbeck is Powering 6G

Peter Asbeck is widely recognized as a pioneer in compound semiconductor technology and power amplifiers for wireless systems, both of which are essential to efficient communication in smartphones and base stations alike. He is an electrical engineering professor emeritus and remains active in research at UC San Diego.  Full Story



Manipulating Light, Matter and Energy with Plasmonic Nanotechnology

Seminar Speaker
Yuebing Zheng

Surface plasmons, which are coherent oscillations of delocalized electrons at the interface of two materials, can concentrate and manipulate light at the nanoscale. We exploit unique optical, thermal, mechanical, electrical and chemical properties associated with surface plasmons to innovate a wide range of optical nanotechnologies in health, energy, manufacturing and national security.

Seminar Contact
Travis Spackman
tspackman@ucsd.edu

Optimal and Adaptive Active Sensing

Seminar Speaker
Dr. Joseph R. Guerci

Advances in radio frequency (RF) solid state transmitters and high performance embedded computing (HPEC) have afforded a new opportunity to “re-write” the textbooks on active sensing systems such as radar. Previously, radars were constrained to pre-determined set of transmit waveforms such as linear frequency modulation (LFM), and pseudo-random binary modulation with constant modulus. It is now possible to utilize advanced arbitrary waveform generators (AWGs) that are also adaptive.

Seminar Contact
Professor Tara Javidi <tjavidi@ucsd.edu>

Non-Hermitian Photonics, Optics at an Exceptional Point

Seminar Speaker
Mercedeh Khajavikhan, University of Central Florida (UCF)

In recent years, non-Hermitian degeneracies, also known as exceptional points (EPs), have emerged as a new paradigm for engineering the response of optical systems. At such points, an N-dimensional space can be represented by a single eigenvalue and a single eigenvector. As a result, these points are associated with abrupt phase transition in parameter space.

Seminar Contact
Prof. Tara Javidi <tjavidi@ucsd.edu>

Autonomous Systems – Past, Present, and Future

Seminar Speaker
Doug Fronius
Northrop Grumman

The history of autonomous aircraft systems over the past 70 years is traced leading up to the technology that formed the foundation of current operational aircraft. The resulting architectures that are currently employed are reviewed. Looking to the future, the development of autonomy for aircraft has taken on a new direction and will be influenced heavily by commercial sector developments.

Seminar Contact
Travis Spackman (tspackman@eng.ucsd.edu)

Travel Fund

The ECE Department is excited to announce a new Travel Fund that will be offered to all eligible undergraduate students for future conference-related travel or participation in a competition. Students can receive the Travel Fund once during their BS career. In order to be eligible, you MUST be:

Acoustic Filter Technology & Design in Modern Cellphones

Seminar Speaker
Perre-Alexandre Girard

The demand for bandwidth in cellphones is driving the industry toward complex RF front-ends that rely heavily on acoustic filters. The main purpose of this talk is to give an overview of filter technologies (SAW, BAW, temperature-compensated SAW), some basic acoustic design techniques (ladder filter, duplexers and multiplexers) and a sense of what to look for when working with filters. We will try to shed some light on the key specifications and trade-offs for RF filters and how they affect the RF front-end of a phone.

Seminar Contact
Bethany Carson
bacarson@eng.ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-822-6347

Seminar on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Communication System for Medical Applications and Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) Systems

Seminar Speaker
Dr. David Nghiem

Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) and Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) technologies have become promising options for wireless medical applications. However, increased body loss at the ISM frequencies utilized in BLE communication systems and common interference sources, including Wi-Fi, IoT, wireless power charging, microwave-ovens, etc. present challenges for medical applications. MBAN frequencies are also quite close to the ISM frequency band. In this seminar, both BLE medical system & MBAN system analysis will be presented. System, interference and MRI safety testing will be discussed.

Seminar Contact
Travis Spackman (trspackman@eng.ucsd.edu)

Estimation Under a Non-Convex Rank Constraint: A Signal and Image Processing Case Study

Seminar Speaker
Dr. Vishal Monga

This talk will cover two seemingly disparate problems under the umbrella of an exact rank constraint: one in statistical and radar signal processing focusing on the estimation of structured covariance matrices and the other a key image processing/vision task called robust alignment of images. In the first part, we look at the regularized maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of structured covariance matrices (SCM) that arise in radar space time adaptive processing.

Seminar Contact
Bethany Carson
Email: bacarson@eng.ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-822-6347

Revolution in P-type Oxide Semiconductor Development Toward Next Generation Flexible Electronics

Seminar Speaker
Kenji Nomura
Obsidian Sensors

Metal oxide semiconductor device technology is to date widely accepted as a technology that enable the development of next generation device applications such as flexible, transparent and low cost electronic devices because of its superior material properties such as reasonably high electron mobility (>10cm2(Vs)-1) and wide compatibility of processing including solution process.

Seminar Contact
Cheryle Wills (cwills@eng.ucsd.edu)

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department traces its roots back to the establishment of the Applied Electrophysics department in 1965, under its founding chair Henry Booker. Through a succession of department realignments emerged today’s ECE in 1987, when the then-combined Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department was split into two departments. Since then, ECE has earned a world-class reputation for producing top-notch engineers for industry and academia.

By the Numbers

$38M+

In Research
Expenditures

17,000+

Alumni

2,200+

Remarkable
Students

65

Award-Winning
Faculty