Newsletter
December 2022

Top Stories
Advice from students who prepped a custom chip for fabrication

What does it take to design a microchip from scratch, prepare it for the foundry, and get a functioning microcontroller back? Students working with Cornell ECE Professor Christopher Batten are finding out, and they have some advice to pass on. Jack Brzozowski, Kyle Infantino and Dilan Lakhani started work on their chip design as undergraduates and turned it into their Master of Engineering project. 
Aaron Wagner has been thinking about the fundamental assumptions surrounding the use of feedback information in digital communication strategies since he was a graduate student.
Hunter Adams travelled to New Mexico to test an innovative new way to launch his ChipSats. Adams was a participant at the Flight Test 10 of the Suborbital Accelerator developed by the space tech company SpinLaunch. The 33-meter tall structure located at Spaceport America is designed to explore the possibility of literally slinging payloads into space using a hypersonic tether spinning at nearly 5,000 miles-per-hour. Watch the video!
Ph.D. candidate Batuhan Karaman and his advisor Mert Sabuncu are leading a team using machine learning to help predict Alzheimer’s stages: “We really need to be able to catch Alzheimer’s disease early on so that we can...deploy whatever treatment options we have.”
Featured Video

Watch how these ECE students invested in their future with a Master of Engineering degree. Whether you want to work in power and energy, bioelectrical engineering, computer architecture, imaging, nanotechnology, photonics, neuroscience, computing, or just want to explore what’s out there for you to discover and have an impact on the world, choosing an M.Eng. project you love is important.
News from the Cornell Chronicle
Awards & Honors
In the Media
ECE students Luis Martinez '22 and Matt Hales '22 wrote about their ECE 4760 project for Servo Magazine. "In this project," they wrote, "we’ve constructed an RC tank which can shoot a foam projectile. The direction as well as the shooting mechanism is controlled by a phone app over Bluetooth which communicates with a Bluetooth module that’s attached to the chassis and onboard microcontroller. Additionally, the tank features an ultrasonic sensor to prevent the user from crashing the tank into any walls or oncoming objects."
Business Insider quoted Huili Grace Xing explaining that chips made with gallium nitride can generate more power than silicon ones in a smaller form. 

Engadget, TechCrunch and The Independent ran stories about microbots with basic electronic "brains" that let them walk autonomously, work that included contributions from Al Molnar's research group.

Gizmodo, The Daily Mail and CNBC picked up the story of Hunter Adams' visit to SpinLaunch.

CleanTechnica included Eilyan Bitar's comments on electric school buses.

Raspberry Pi covered Hunter Adams' ECE 4760 course.
Trending on Social Media
Joe Skovira published this demo video in August of the ECE 5725 project called AutoChess by Orko Sinha '21, M.Eng. '22 and Alexander Drazic '22, M.Eng. '23.

It now has over 110,000 views! People really do love chess...
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