A handful of the 50 volunteers at Copenhagen

Suborbitals, the world’s only amateur crewed spaceflight program.

Inside A DIY Rocket Program

Facebook’s Real Plan for Cryptocurrency Financial services is just a startP.10

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The End of Diabetes? A smart artificial pancreas adjusts insulin on the flyP.38

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ON THE COVER: Photo by Mads Stenfatt

The First Crowdfunded Astronaut A DIY rocket is under con­struction in a Copenhagen warehouse. By Mads Stenfatt

Creating the Artificial PancreasIt dispenses just the right amount of insulin at just the right time. By Boris Kovatchev & Anna Kovatcheva

Ohm’s Law + Kirchhoff’s Current Law = Better AIDoing AI using analog circuits saves power. By Geoffrey W. Burr, Abu Sebastian, Takashi Ando & Wilfried Haensch

22

38

44

62

VOLUME 58 / ISSUE 12 DECEMBER 2021

30The Smartly

Dressed Spacecraft

Electronic fabrics sensitive to vibration and charge could revolutionize space structures.

By Juliana Cherston & Joseph A. Paradiso

NEWS 66G Power Struggles (p.6) Jupiter’s Electric Blanket (p.8) Facebook Cryptocurrency (p.10)

HANDS ON 14 A self-contained messenger for ham radio.

CROSSTALK 18 Numbers Don’t Lie (p.18) Gizmo (p.20) Macro & Micro (p.21)

PAST FORWARD 76 Bright Lights of Christmas

THE INSTITUTE

AC Grid HistoryThe first three­phase AC electrical plant.

FAR RIGHT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

Photo by Bob O’Connor DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  1

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HENRIK JORDAHN

BACK STORY

A Skydiver Who Sews

M ads Stenfatt first contacted Copenhagen Suborbitals with some constructive criticism. In 2011, while looking at photos of the DIY rocketeers’ latest rocket launch, he had noticed a camera mounted close to the parachute apparatus. Stenfatt

sent an email detailing his concern—namely, that a parachute’s lines could easily get tangled around the camera. “The answer I got was essentially, ‘If you can do better, come join us and do it yourself,’ ” he remembers. That’s how he became a volunteer with the world’s only crowdfunded crewed spaceflight program.

As an amateur skydiver, Stenfatt [above] knew the basic mechanics of parachute packing and deployment. He started helping Copenhagen Suborbitals design and pack parachutes, and a few years later he took over the job of sewing the chutes. He had never used a sewing machine before, but he learned quickly over nights and weekends at his dining room table.

One of his favorite projects was the design of a high-altitude parachute for the Nexø II rocket, launched in 2018. While puzzling over the design of a prototype’s air intakes, he found himself on a Danish sewing website looking at brassiere components. He decided to use bra underwires to stiffen the air intakes and keep them open, which worked quite well. Though he eventually went in a different design direction, the episode is a classic example of the Copenhagen Suborbitals ethos: Gather inspiration and resources from wherever you find them to get the job done.

Today, Stenfatt serves as the team’s lead parachute designer, frequent spokesperson, and astronaut candidate, as he writes about in this issue on p. 22. He also continues to skydive in his spare time, with hundreds of jumps to his name. Having ample experience zooming down through the sky, he’s intently curious about what it would feel like to go the other direction. ■

2  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

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CONTRIBUTORS

JULIANA CHERSTON Cherston is a Ph.D. candidate in the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab. In this issue, she and the group’s director, Joseph A. Paradiso, explain how they aim to transform the outer surfaces of spacecraft, space habitats, and spacesuits into sophisticated data-gathering instruments [p. 30]. “I serve as a bridge between other technologists and scientists on our team, which requires playing some of each role myself,” Cherston says.

ALLISON MARSHEach month, Marsh, an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina, features a different object in Past Forward that helps shed light on our shared past. This issue’s object [p. 76] is literally illuminating: a 1925 Christmas bulb shaped like a doll’s head. Marsh chose it to explore the history of Christmas lights “because it’s so creepy,” she says.

BORIS KOVATCHEVInspired by his father’s lifelong struggle with diabetes, Kovatchev, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Diabetes Technology, used his skills as a mathematician to model how the body governs the concentration of glucose in the bloodstream. That work led to the advent of a functioning artificial pancreas, now used by millions and described by Kovatchev and his daughter Anna on page 38.

GEOFFREY W. BURRBurr is an IEEE Fellow and a distinguished research staff member at IBM Research, in Almaden, Calif. Together with fellow IBM researchers Abu Sebastian in Zurich and Takashi Ando and IEEE Fellow Wilfried Haensch in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Burr works on using analog circuits to improve AI, as they explain on page 44. The technology was originally aimed at brain-inspired neural networks, says Burr. But the algorithms involved were unproven. He steered the research toward more conventional AIs, so “we could quickly start to improve things instead of trying to guess what went wrong,” he says.

4  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

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6  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND SCIENCE DECEMBER 2021

W hen wireless researchers or telecom companies talk about future sixth-genera-tion (6G) networks, they’re

talking mostly about their best guesses and wish lists. There are as yet no widely agreed upon technical standards outlin-ing 6G’s frequencies, signal modulations, and waveforms. And yet the economic and political forces that will define 6G are already in play.

And here’s the biggest wrinkle: Because there are no major U.S. manufacturers of cellular infrastructure equipment, the United States may not have the superpow-ers it thinks it does in shaping the future course of wireless communications.

While many U.S. tech giants will surely be involved in 6G standards development, none of those companies make the equip-ment that will comprise the network. Companies like Ericsson (Sweden), Nokia (Finland), Samsung (South Korea), and Huawei (China) build the radio units, baseband units, and other hardware and software that go into cell towers and the wired networks that connect them.

As one example, equipment manu-facturers (such as China’s Huawei and ZTE) will probably push for standards that prioritize the distance a signal can travel, while minimizing the interference it experiences along the way. Meanwhile, device makers (like U.S. heavyweights Apple and Alphabet) will have more stake in standardizing signal modulations that drain their gadgets’ batteries the least.

How such squabbles might be resolved, of course, is still an open ques-tion. But now is arguably the best time to begin asking it.

6G is—and isn’t yet—around the corner. When the Global Communications Con-ference (Globecom) begins in Madrid this December, attending researchers and telecom executives will find it features no fewer than five workshops devoted to 6G development. Compare that to the 2020 iteration of the IEEE Commu-nication Society’s annual conference, which—pandemic not withstanding—

Photo-illustration by Edmon de Haro

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Geopolitics Is Already Shaping 6G Power struggles and clashing infrastructure priorities will forge next-gen networksBY MICHAEL KOZIOL

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  7

THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND SCIENCE DECEMBER 2021

5G and its predecessors have been successful because they’ve been universally implemented. 6G still has time to congeal—or not.

included nothing 6G related beyond a 4-hour summit on the topic. And if you step back one year further to Globecom 2019, you’ll find that 6G was limited to a single technical talk.

Cellular standards are developed and overseen by a global cellular industry consortium, the 3rd Generation Part-nership Project (3GPP). Past wireless generations coalesced around univer-sally agreed-upon standards relatively smoothly. But early research into 6G is emerging in a more tense geopolitical environment, and the quibbles that arose during 5G’s standardization could blos-som into more serious disagreements this time around.

At the moment, says Mehdi Bennis, a professor of wireless communications at the University of Oulu, in Finland, home of the 6G Flagship research initiative, the next generation of wireless standards is quite open ended. “Nobody has a clear idea. We maybe have some pointers.”

To date, 6G has been discussed in terms of applications (including autono-mous vehicles and holographic displays) and research interests—such as terahertz waves and spectrum sharing. So for the next few years, whenever a so-called “6G satellite” is launched, for example, take it with a grain of salt: It just means someone is testing technologies that may make their way into the 6G standards down the line.

But such tests, although easily over-hyped and used to set precedents and score points, are still important. The reason each generation of wireless—2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G—has been so suc-cessful is because each has been defined by standards that have been universally implemented. In other words, a network operator in the United States like AT&T can buy equipment from Swedish manu-facturer Ericsson to build its cellular net-work, and everything will function with phones made in China because they’re drawing on the same set of agreed-upon standards. (Unfortunately however, you’ll still run into problems if you try to mix and match infrastructure equipment from different manufacturers.)

In 2016, as the standards were being sorted out for 5G, a clash emerged in trying to decide what error-correcting technique would be used for wireless sig-nals. Qualcomm, based in San Diego, and other companies pushed for low-density parity checks (LDPC), which had been first described decades earlier but had yet to materialize commercially. Huawei, backed by other Chinese companies, pushed for a new technique in which it had invested a significant amount of time and energy called polar codes. A dead-lock at the 3GPP meeting that November resulted in a split standard: LDPC would be used for radio channels that send user data, while polar codes would be used for channels that coordinated those user-data channels.

That Huawei managed to take polar codes from a relatively unknown math-ematical theory and almost single-hand-edly develop it into a key component of 5G led to some proclamations that the company (and by extension, China) was winning the battle for 5G development. The implicit losers were Europe and the United States. The incident made at least one thing abundantly clear: There is a lot of money, prestige, and influence in the offing for a company that gets the tech it’s been championing into the standards.

In May 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Indus-try and Security added Huawei to its Entity List—which places require-

ments on, or prohibits, importing and exporting items. Sources that IEEE Spectrum spoke to noted how the move increased tensions in the wireless industry, echoing concerns from 2019. “We are already seeing the balkaniza-tion of technology in many domains. If this trend continues, companies will have to create different products for different markets, leading to even further divergence,” Zvika Krieger, the head of technology policy at the World Economic Forum told MIT Technology Review at the time of the ban. The move curtailed the success Huawei originally saw from its 5G standards wins, with the rotating chairman, Eric Xu, recently saying that the company’s cellphone revenue will drop by US $30 billion to $40 billion this year from a reported $136.7 billion in 2020.

As fundamental research continues into what technologies and techniques will be implemented in 6G, it’s too early to say what the next generation’s version of polar codes will be, if any. But already, different priorities are emerging in the values that companies and governments in different parts of the world want to see enshrined in any standards to come.

“There are some unique, or at least stronger, views on things like personal liberty, data security, and privacy in Europe, and if we wish our new technol-ogies to support those views, it needs to be baked into the technology,” said Colin Willcock, the chairman of the board for the Europe-based 6G Smart Networks and Services Industry Association, speaking at the Brooklyn 6G Summit in October. Bennis agrees: “In Europe, we’re very keen on privacy, that’s a big, big, I mean, big requirement.” Bennis notes that privacy is being built into 5G “a posteriori” as researchers tack it onto the established standards. The European Union has previously passed laws protecting personal data and pri-vacy such as the General Data Protec-tion Regulation (GDPR).

So how will concepts like privacy, security, or sustainability be embedded

NEWS

in 6G—if at all? For instance, one future version of 6G could include differential privacy, in which data-set patterns are shared without sharing individual data points. Or it could include federated learning, a machine learning technique that instead of being trained on a central-ized data set uses one scattered across multiple locations—thereby effectively anonymizing information that malicious actors in a network might otherwise put to nefarious purposes. These techniques are already being implemented in 5G networks by researchers, but integrat-ing them into 6G standards would give them more weight.

The Washington, D.C.–based Alli-ance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions launched the Next G Alliance in October 2020 to strengthen U.S. technological leadership in 6G over the course of the next decade. Mike Naw-rocki, the alliance’s managing director, says the alliance is taking a “holistic” approach to 6G’s development. “We’re really trying to look at it from the per-spective of what are some of the big societal drivers that we would envision for the end of the decade,” Nawrocki says, citing as one example the need to connect industries previously uncon-cerned with the wireless industry such as health care and agriculture.

If different regions—the United States, Europe, China, Japan, South Korea, and so on—find themselves at loggerheads about how to define certain standards or support incom-patible policies about the implementa-tions or applications of 6G networks, global standards could ultimately, in a worst-case scenario, disintegrate. Different countries could decide it’s easier to go it alone and develop their own 6G technologies without global cooperation. This would result in bal-kanized wireless technologies around the world. Smartphone users in China might find their phones unable to con-nect with any other wireless network outside their country’s borders. Or, for instance, AT&T might, in such a sce-nario, no longer buy equipment from Nokia because it’s incompatible with AT&T ’s network operations.

Although that’s a dire outcome, the industry consensus is that it’s not likely yet—but certainly more plausible than for any other wireless generation. n

F or all its other problems, Earth is lucky. Warmed mostly by the sun, 150 mil-lion kilometers away,

shielded by a magnetosphere and a thin but protective atmosphere, Earth has a surface temperature that averages 14 °C—a good number to support liquid oceans and a riot of carbon-based life.

Jupiter is a different story. Its upper atmosphere (Jupiter has no solid surface) has a temperature closer to what you’d find on Venus than on some of Jupiter’s own moons.

Jupiter is 778 million km from the sun, where sunlight is less than 4 percent as intense as it is on Earth. By all rights, the plan-

et’s upper atmosphere should be about -70 °C.

Instead, it exceeds 400 °C in places. Scientists have sometimes spoken of Jupiter as having an “energy crisis.” Now, an international team led by James O’Donoghue of JAXA, the Japanese space agency, says they’ve found an answer.

Jupiter’s polar auroras are the largest and most powerful known in the solar system—and O’Dono-ghue says the energy in them, caused as Jupiter’s atmosphere is buffeted by solar wind, is strong enough to heat the outer atmo-sphere of the entire planet.

“The auroral power...is actually 100 terawatts per hemisphere, and

SPACE

Jupiter’s Electric Blanket Auroras explain why the

gas giant is so hotBY NED POTTER

J. NICHOLS/UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER/ESA/NASA

8  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

NEWS

I always like that fact,” says O’Donoghue. “I think that’s something like 100,000 power stations.”

The auroras had been suspected as Jupiter’s secret heat source since the 1970s. But until now, scientists thought Jupiter’s giant, swirling east-west cloud bands might shear the heat away before it could spread very far from the poles. Winds in the cloud bands reach 500 kilo-meters per hour.

To try to solve the mystery, the research team set out to create an infrared heat map of Jupiter’s atmosphere, some-thing that had never been done in detail.

They used the 10-meter Keck II tele-scope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, one of the five largest in the world, and took spectrographic readings on two nights: 14 April 2016 and 25 January 2017.

Their heat map from the first night of observing showed that indeed the regions around the polar auroras were hottest, and the heat did spread from there—though the effect tailed off toward Jupiter’s equator. The heat was strong enough to propagate despite those pow-erful winds. But the auroras the team observed nine months later were about 100 °C hotter than on the first night, and so were temperatures at every point from there to the equator.

It turned out, in fact, that on that night in 2017, Jupiter had been hit by a surge in solar wind—ionized particles that would compress Jupiter’s magnetic field and make the aurora more powerful.

It was sheer luck, a “happy accident,” says O’Donoghue, that the surge of parti-cles happened on the second night.

Other researchers had already tried to explain Jupiter’s warmth by other means—perhaps some sort of acous-tic-wave heating or convection from the planet’s core, for instance—but they couldn’t create convincing models that worked as well as the auroras. O’Dono-ghue and his colleagues say they went through more than a dozen drafts before their paper was accepted for publication in the journal Nature earlier this year.

“We once thought that it could happen, that the aurora could be the source,” O’Donoghue says, “but we showed that it does happen.” n

An expanded version of this article appears online as “Revealed: Jupiter’s Secret Power Source.” 25 January 2017

14 April 2016

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Temperature,

kelvins

TOP: J. O’DONOGHUE/JAXA; BOTTOM: J. O’DONOGHUE/JAXA (HEAT MAP); STSCI/NASA (PLANET)

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  9

NEWS

SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook Tiptoes Toward Cryptocurrency Rollout of the new Novi wallet hints at big ambitionsBY EDD GENT

F acebook has finally made its long-awaited foray into crypto-currencies, but the project is a shadow of its ambitious initial

plans. The company has launched its Novi digital wallet, but without the Diem cryptocurrency, which was supposed to be the cornerstone of the enterprise.

The limited pilot will be restricted to 200,000 users in the United States and Guatemala. And with the launch

of Facebook-backed Diem still held up by regulatory concerns in the United States, Novi will instead allow users to exchange the USDP stablecoin from Paxos Trust Co., whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar.

Promotional material and comments from the head of Facebook Financial (F2) David Marcus suggest the pilot is focused on muscling into the lucrative remittance market. Remittances are pay-

ments made by foreign workers to their families back home, and experts say it is one of the most compelling use cases for blockchain-based payments. But the pilot represents a significant reduction in scope since Facebook first unveiled its plans for the Libra cryptocurrency (Diem’s precursor) back in 2019.

“We started with Libra, which was intended as this all-conquering crypto-currency that can be used for anything,” says Nick Maynard, head of research at Juniper Research. “What we’ve seen is a repeated scaling back of what they are trying to achieve.”

That’s likely a reflection of the signif-icant scrutiny the project has received, says Maynard. Although the pilot will lack the Diem cryptocurrency, the an-nouncement was met by swift condem-nation from U.S. lawmakers, who called for the company to immediately abandon the project in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The company says it still plans to transition to Diem once it receives reg-ulatory approval. But given the consid-erable heat Facebook has come under, Grace Broadbent, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, says starting small is a smart approach. And remittances are an obvious starting point, she adds.

Sending money internationally tradi-tionally relies on a complicated network of arrangements between individual banks. That means transactions pass through many intermediaries all keen to take a cut, which both slows things down and increases costs. A crypto-currency running on a blockchain would allow these transactions to happen on the same shared ledger, which in theory should reduce the number of intermedi-aries involved.

“We found that blockchain-based remittances is one of the most mature use cases [for the technology],” she says. “A lot of remittances’ pain points—like complexity, processing costs, [and] speed—really play to blockchain tech-nology’s strengths.”

It also represents a massive market, says Broadbent: Insider Intelligence forecasts worldwide remittances will be worth US $661 billion this year. But Novi seems unlikely to be able to capital-ize on that value, as it has committed to charging zero fees for international trans-fers. F2’s Marcus has said the company J

AKUB PORZYCKI/NUR PHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

10  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

NEWS

plans instead to use free person-to-per-son transfers to build up its user base, before branching out to become a more general payment provider and making money on merchant fees.

The company’s ultimate goal is prob-ably to create a super app in the mold of China’s WeChat, says Maynard, which has managed to combine both social and payment features in one place. And while marrying this with a home-grown cryptocurrency might reduce its processing costs, the real ambition is to become the main payments intermedi-ary for its enormous global user base. “You don’t need the cryptocurrency to do that. Having the wallet will do all of that for you,” says Maynard.

That might be easier said than done though. Getting merchants to accept new payment methods is notoriously challenging, says Maynard, as you not only need to demonstrate that large numbers of people want to use them, but also that you can provide the same kind of fraud-prevention and dispute-resolu-tion services they’re used to from tradi-tional players.

Even with Facebook’s massive user base, that will take a long time, says Maynard. And it’s far from clear that people drawn in by cheap remittances will also use the app for everyday pay-ments, particularly when they have to be made in cryptocurrency rather than local currency.

Running a free global remittance ser-vice for potentially millions of users is also an expensive way to build up your user base, says Maynard. He suspects the com-pany may take a similar approach to other cross-border payments services that offer free transfers, but then make money on less-than-favorable exchange rates.

“Does Facebook have deep enough pockets to do this as a pure loss leader?

Yeah, of course they do,” says Maynard. “But fundamentally I don’t think they could create it on a massive scale out-side of a pilot without having some kind of monetization.”

Novi’s targeting of remittances could also hint at a deeper goal, says Ludovico Rella, a research associate at Durham University, in England. In certain cor-ners of the tech industry there is an atti-tude that the Global South represents an empty space where first movers can easily install themselves as the predom-inant intermediary for everything from

payments to Internet connectivity.“Being the first mover is more import-

ant than revenue itself because it’s a matter of becoming the infrastructure, the rails on which data and money flows,” says Rella. Facebook was accused of doing exactly this when it tried to set up a free but restricted Internet service in India called Free Basics.

If Novi can collect comprehensive data on the financial behavior of its users, it could allow the company to provide other financial services such as credit and insurance, says Rella. And while the company has committed not to share individual’s financial information with Facebook’s advertising business or third parties, Rella says it could still use anal-ysis of aggregate data from many users to fine-tune its highly lucrative targeted advertising business.

“It will be interesting to see how the promises and the public statements of Facebook will square with the business model they decide to adopt,” says Rella.

Facebook did not respond to an interview request. n

“ Being the first mover is more important than revenue itself because it’s a matter of becoming the infrastructure, the rails on which data and money flows.”—LUDOVICO RELLA, DURHAM UNIVERSITY

JOURNAL WATCH

Could Starlink Be a Backup GPS?If GPS systems went down or were hacked tomorrow, the disruption to so many critical operations across the globe would be catastrophic, costing some countries more than US $1 billion a day.

“There is an urgent need to find an alternative robust and accurate navigation system to GPS,” says Zak Kassas, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Irvine.

Fortunately, Kassas and his UC Irvine colleagues have devised an approach that harnesses the more abundant and closer-to-home satellites in low Earth orbit, such as the Starlink fleet of Internet satellites operated by SpaceX.

His team’s new approach uses a receiver on the ground that tracks the phase of the underlying carrier wave emitted by a low-orbiting satellite. They developed an algorithm that then calculates the ground receiver’s position, velocity, and time in relation to the LEO satellites above.

“They are about 20 times closer to Earth than GPS satellites, which means we receive their signals at considerably higher power than that of GPS. This makes them more difficult to jam or spoof and makes them reliable in environments where GPS signals are not,” explains Kassas.

In the spring of 2021, the researchers successfully used six Starlink satellites to track their position accurately within just 7.7 meters. The results are described in a study published recently in IEEE Transac-tions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. —Michelle Hampson

THE NEWS SECTION CONTINUES ON PAGE 50

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  11

THE BIG PICTURE

Transforming Power ResearchDelft University of Technology opened its new Electrical Sustainable Power Lab on 1 October 2021. The lab, which replaced an older lab dedicated to high-voltage transmission experiments, is intended to take a holistic approach to designing new, sustainable electrical power systems in light of climate change. “The keyword of the lab is ‘system integration,’ ” says Miro Zeman, a professor of photovoltaic materials and devices at TU Delft. Researchers at the lab are not only interested in developing individual electrical components that can work with solar and wind sources but in ensuring that those individual components work efficiently and sustainably when put together. This particular image shows the lab’s high-voltage research area—the blue pylons are transformers. At the bottom right is a black cable being used in experiments to find alternatives to sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas that is commonly used as an electrical insulator. Behind the transformers—and protected from them by a Faraday cage—are additional labs devoted to developing switches and other electrical components.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCAS VAN DER WEE

12  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

THE BIG PICTURE

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  13

TECH TO TINKER WITH DECEMBER 2021

Phone-Free Texting HamMessenger makes it easy to SMS over VHF

BY DALE THOMAS

M y first exposure to radio communication happened when I was around 5 or 6 years old. My dad was work-

ing as an airport electrician. He would bring walkie-talkies home, and my broth-ers and I would play with them around the yard. That’s as far as my radio expe-rience went, until a friend and I decided to get our amateur radio licenses togeth-er. This was only months before the COVID-19 lockdown, so it turned out to

The HamMessenger [right] lets you send short texts

via a VHF radio without any additional equipment.

Illustrations by James Provost14  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

TECH TO TINKER WITH DECEMBER 2021

be the perfect time to learn to communi-cate using amateur radio!

However, I found that just talking over ham radio was boring for me. I started thinking about an old police scanner my dad owned and how we would sometimes hear odd sounds that sort of sounded like a dial-up modem. And that is when the lightbulb for HamMessenger turned on. What if I could find an easy way to communicate digitally with my handheld radio?

I started learning about the many dif-ferent types of digital communication modes that people use with ham radio, and I came across APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). APRS is a store-and-forward radio network proto-col developed over 25 years ago by U.S. Navy researcher Robert Bruninga and was originally designed to track tactical

information in real time. APRS operates on a frequency within the VHF 2-meter band and is popular for applications like location transponders or weather sta-tions. You can view APRS activity in your area at www.aprs.fi right now.

APRS supports sending text mes-sages, and if you’re in range of an Inter-net-connected gateway node you can even exchange SMS texts with cell-phones and send one-line emails. Send-ing texts traditionally meant using a PC hooked up to a so-called terminal node controller (TNC) packet radio modem, which is in turn connected to a radio (signals are transmitted as audio tones, just like old dial-up modems). More recently, TNC modems that interface with smartphones have been created. And these are awesome projects! But at its core, HamMessenger was created in

the shadow of my simple childhood experiences. I wanted a portable device I could connect to my handheld radio that was completely self-contained, with a keyboard, screen, and GPS receiver all built in.

First, I would need to nail down the hardware and software I was going to use. I found MicroAPRS, which is an open-source and Arduino-compatible firmware package for DIY packet radio modems. With MicroAPRS you can quickly implement a full-featured APRS modem with the ability to automatically switch the radio between receiving and transmitting.

This was perfect. I could now focus on the rest of the HamMessenger. I thought about building it around a Rasp-berry Pi. That would have been cool, but a Pi is overkill. It would need a lot of

The HamMessenger is compatible with most handheld VHF radios [left] by using an adapter cable [top, middle] that connects to a printed circuit board with a display, GPS receiver, and Arduino Pro acting as a modem [top right]. The PCB plugs into an Arduino Mega [middle right], a GPS antenna [top left], a mini keyboard [bottom middle], and batteries [bottom right].

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  15

HANDS ON

power, and there’s a risk of corrupting the filesystem if you don’t do a controlled shutdown, a problem if the battery dies.

I decided on a dual Arduino approach. An Arduino Pro Mini (US $10) would act as the modem, running MicroAPRS and communicating with the rest of the system via a serial connection. An Ardu-ino Mega 2560 ($40) would be the central controller, tying together the modem, keyboard, display, and GPS. Recharge-able batteries with a battery-manage-ment board would provide the power.

The GPS provides the location data that is integrated into most APRS trans-missions. I chose a $10 NEO 6M-based GPS receiver that is popular with hobby ists for things such as DIY drones. Like my modem, the NEO has a serial interface.

In my initial design, the human input setup was very simple, with just three buttons. One button let me step through displayed menus and modify parameters, one button selected a submenu or set a parameter, and the last button let me cancel a parameter entry or navigate to a previous menu.

Ultimately, because of the difficulty of using the buttons to enter text mes-sages, I replaced them with a mini CardKB QWERTY keyboard ($8.50). However, the limits of the three-button system forced me to simplify the HamMessenger’s user interface as much as possible, something I am very thankful for now, as it means the HamMessenger is easy to operate with just a basic knowl-edge of APRS.

For the display, I chose an OLED screen for its power efficiency. The only drawback for hobbyist OLEDs is their small size. The 0.96-inch displays are the most common, but I was able to find a $9 1.3-inch display that communicates via an I2C serial bus.

The final modular component I needed for the HamMessenger was some nonvolatile storage for received mes-sages. I decided on a micro-SD card reader because they natively speak the SPI interface protocol.

All of these feed into the Arduino Mega. The Mega was chosen for the cen-tral controller as it doesn’t need a lot of power, yet has enough resources to

handle all the different module connec-tions—two serial, two SPI, and one I2C connection. (Then I added a third serial port so you can control the HamMessen-ger with a PC or other device using an ASCII-based API.)

I designed a shield (a printed circuit board that accommodates the modules and some supporting circuitry that simply plugs into the top of the Mega)using Autodesk’s Eagle, and then used the shield design files to help create a 3D-printed enclosure in Fusion 360 (full details are available on the HamMessen-ger GitHub page).

Currently, the HamMessenger is still in a prototype stage, but it works well. I have a HamMessenger installed in my truck that doubles as a location beacon. It will never replace a cellphone for most people, of course, but those in places without coverage might find it useful. Still, it was primarily created as a way to promote electronics and alternative uses of amateur radio, and if you want an easy way to learn and blend these hobbies, then I think the HamMessenger is a great way to do that. n

The Automatic Packet Reporting System relies on a network of digital repeaters, or digipeaters, that repeatedly retransmit messages sent by handheld and other radios. Other digipeaters that pick up the signal in turn will retransmit the message up to a specified number of hops. Some digipeaters are connected to the Internet, which allows the user to send messages to distant digipeaters or relay them as cellphone SMS messages or emails.

SMSgateway

Emailgateway

16  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

SOURCE: HIRED 2021 STATE OF TECH SALARIES

SHARING THE EXPERIENCES OF WORKING ENGINEERS DECEMBER 2021

Tech Pay Rises (Almost) Everywhere      The “Great Resignation” is pushing salaries upBY TEKLA S. PERRY

0 10-10 8-8 6-6 4-4 2-2 0

100,000

80,000

60,000

40,000

20,000

180,000

160,000

140,000

120,000

U.S. average

U.K. average

Remote average

Dallas

Atlanta

New York

San Fransisco Bay Area

Denver

Toronto

Boston

London

Los Angeles

Washington, D.C.

Chicago

Seattle

Austin

San Diego

-1.1

2.1

4.6

-9.5

Global average 6.2

-5.5

-1

-0.3

1

1

1

2.1

2.3

3

3.5

4.6

5

9.1

U.S. average

U.K. average

Remote average

Dallas

Atlanta

New York

San Fransisco Bay Area

Denver

Toronto

Boston

London

Los Angeles

Washington, D.C.

Chicago

Seattle

Austin

San Diego

152,000

102,000

143,000

124,000

Global average 138,000

136,000

151,000

165,000

135,000

95,000

147,000

102,000

149,000

136,000

133,000

158,000

144,000

144,000

Percentage increase/decrease Salaries, in US $

G lobally, tech salaries climbed an average of 6.2 percent to US $138,000, with the San Diego area clocking the big-

gest jump, at 9.1 percent, to $144,000. That’s according to Hired’s 2021 State of Tech Salaries report. The San Fran-

cisco Bay area registered a slight decline, though average salaries there still top the charts at $165,000. New York City tech salaries slipped slightly as well, but the biggest drops came in Dallas and Atlanta. The driver seems to be the “Great Resignation” currently under-

way as workers change jobs at an accel-erated rate in the hunt for better salaries, benefits, or work-life balance. The con-sequent urgent need of companies to replace departed tech employees is pushing salaries up in most areas, with just a few regions recording declines. n

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  17

OPINION, INSIGHT, AND ANALYSIS NUMBERS DON’T LIE BY VACLAV SMIL

East London’s Greenwich Hill to Bengal, courtesy of the Grand Vacuum Tube Company.

Heath was no science-fiction pioneer. His fanci-ful etching was just a spoof of an engineering project proposed in 1825 and called the London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company, which was to be established with the capital of 20 million pounds sterling. The concept was based on a 1799 proposal made by George Medhurst: A rectangular tunnel was to move goods in wagons, the vacuum was to be created by the condensation of steam, and the impe-tus was to be “the pressure of the atmosphere, which...is so astonishing as almost to exceed belief.”

Yes, this is the first known attempt at what during the second decade of the 21st century became known as the hyperloop. That word, coined by Elon Musk, constitutes his most publicized contribution to the technology.

By the time Heath was drawing his interconti-nental conveyor, enough was known about vacuum to realize that it would be the best option for achiev-ing unprecedented travel speeds. But no materials were available to build such a tube—above all, there

“L ord how this world improves as we grow older,” reads the caption for a panel in the “March of Intellect,” part of a series of

colored etchings published between 1825 and 1829. The artist, William Heath (1794–1840), shows many futuristic contraptions, including a four-wheeled steam-powered horse called Velocity, a suspension bridge from Cape Town to Bengal, a gun-carrying platform lifted by four balloons, and a giant winged flying fish conveying convicts from England to New South Wales, in Australia. But the main object is a massive, seamless metallic tube taking travelers from

William Heath’s 1829 engraving [above] pokes fun at a vacuum tube that conveys travelers from London to Bengal. A 1910 photograph shows a working model [bottom right] of Émile Bachelet’s magnetically levitated railway, in Mount Vernon, N.Y.; a public demonstration [top right] of the railway takes place in London in 1914.

The Hyperloop Is Hyper OldElon Musk merely renamed a 200-year-old dream

LEFT: UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: ÉMILE BACHELET

COLLECTION/ARCHIVES CENTER/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY (2)

18  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

OPINION, INSIGHT, AND ANALYSIS NUMBERS DON’T LIE BY VACLAV SMIL

Virgin Hyperloop, which aims to commercialize the concept, has built a test track in Las Vegas [above]. The passenger pod [top right] is magnetically levitated; it can be introduced into the vacuum tube through an air lock [bottom right] at the end.

was no way to produce affordable high-tensile steel—nor were there ready means to enclose people in vacuum-moving containers.

Less than a century later, Émile Bachelet, a French electrician who emigrated to the United States, solved the propulsion part of the challenge with his 19 March 1912 patent of a “Levitation transp-mitting apparatus.” In 1914, he presented a small-scale working model of a magnetically levitated train with a tubular prow, powerful magnets at the track’s bottom, and tubular steel cars on an aluminum base.

Japanese researchers have been experimenting with a modern version of Bachelet’s maglev concept since 1969, testing open-air train models at a track in Miyazaki. Short trials were done in Germany and the Soviet Union. In 2002, China got the only operating maglev line—built by Siemens—running from the Shanghai Pudong International Airport to Shanghai; now China claims to be preparing to test it at speeds up to 1,000 kilometers per hour. But outside East Asia, maglev remained nothing but a curiosity until 2012, when Elon Musk put his spin on it.

People unaware of this long history greeted the

hyperloop as stunningly original and fabulously trans-formative. A decade later we have many route proposi-als, and many companies engaged in testing and design, but not a single commercial application that can demonstrate that this is an affordable, profitable, reliable, and widely replicable travel option. Vacuum physicists and railway engineers, who best appreciate the challenges involved in such projects, have pointed out a long list of fundamental difficulties that must be overcome before public-carrying vacuum tubes could be as common as steel-wheel high-speed rail.

Other, nontrivial, problems run from the common and intractable—obtaining rights-of-way for hun-dreds, even thousands, of kilometers of track ele-vated on pylons in NIMBY-prone societies—to the uncommon and unprecedented: maintaining the thousandfold pressure difference between the inside and outside steel walls of an evacuated tube along hundreds of kilometers of track while coping with the metal’s thermal expansion.

Before rushing to buy shares in a hyperloop ven-ture in 2022, remember the 1825 London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company. nS

ARAH LAWSON/VIRGIN HYPERLOOP

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  19

CROSSTALK GIZMO  BY MATTHEW S. SMITH MACRO & MICRO  BY MARK PESCE

When the Chips Are DownAuto sales are suffering from the chip shortage, but most consumer electronics are pouring into stores

H ot consumer tech is hard to snag this hol-iday season. Get used to it.

New-car shoppers in the United States, China, and everywhere else face slim

inventory and dealers unwilling to budge on price. It’s all because of the global chip shortage, which has prompted the Biden administration to support legislation that includes US $52 billion in subsidies for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

But the problem extends far beyond new cars. A report by The Information found that 70 percent of wireless retail stores in the United States faced smartphone shortages. Graphics card pricing remains well above the manufacturer’s suggested retail level and shows no sign of retreat. Game conv-soles are drawing hundreds-long lines a full year after launch. Televisions are both more expensive and more difficult to find than last year.

You might think this is a temporary, COVID- related supply-chain shortfall, but no. The problem is not the number of PlayStation 5 consoles in stock. The problem is the people in line ahead of you.

Sony’s PlayStation 5 sales data illustrates the nature of the challenge. Global sales of the PlayStation 5 outpace those of the PlayStation 4 at this point in the product’s life cycle: The PS5 has sold more quickly than any other console in Sony’s history. The same pattern holds for PCs, smart,-phones, video games, and tablets, which all saw an uptick in year-over-year sales during the first quar-ter of 2021. That’s quite an achievement, given the unprecedented, lockdown-driven highs of 2020.

The serious chip shortage really is hobbling the production of automobiles, the largest and most expensive of all our consumer gadgets. But it’s a mistake to assume that this shortage limits supplies of lesser gadgets, most of which are in fact pouring into stores and then flying off the shelves.

You should expect unrelenting prices and very long lead times that only lengthen. If you want in-demand gear to unwrap for the holidays, whether it’s a game console or the new iPad Mini, it may already be too late to get it (from a retailer, at least—there’s always eBay). And you should plan to plan ahead for the next year, as there’s no sign that supply will catch up in 2022.

This may annoy shoppers, but the disruption among consumer tech companies is even more dire. Record demand is typically a good thing, but the sudden surge has forced a competition for chip pro-duction that only the largest companies can win. Rumors hint that Apple has locked in most, if not all, leading-edge chip production from Taiwan Semig-conductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest independent semiconductor foundry. Apple’s order is said to include up to 100 million chips for new iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. Even large compa-nies like Qualcomm are struggling to compete with Apple’s size and volume.

Big moves from big companies have the trickle-down effect of delaying innovative ideas from smaller players: a crank-powered game console, a cusl-tomizable LED face mask, and a tiny, 200-watt USB charger are just three out of many examples. The result could be a subtle, unfortunate squeeze on tiny tech startups that can spoil the most conservative produc-tion timeline. Backers are likely to face ever-increasing waits. Some will give up and demand a refund.

So, should you learn to live with stock notifica-tions and long lines indefinitely? Maybe not. Invest-ment in production might well catch up with demand by 2023. Industry analysts worry this could lead to a price crash if semiconductor manufacturers overa-shoot. Perhaps the summer of 2023 will be the year you can once again buy the latest consumer tech not just minutes but hours after it’s released. Until then, well, you’ll just have to be patient. n

The automotive industry’s problems really are the result of a serious chip shortage. But that’s the excep-tion: Most consum-er tech is pouring into stores, then flying off the shelves.

Illustration by Adam Howling20  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

CROSSTALK GIZMO  BY MATTHEW S. SMITH MACRO & MICRO  BY MARK PESCE

Surviving the RobocalypseAutomation is striking at the heart of knowledge work

D oes the value of a job lie in how long it resists automation?

Over the course of the pandemic, I saw a growing wave of mealtime deliveries:

riders whizzing by silently on electric bicycles, fer-rying takeout meals to folks in my urban neighbor-hood who don’t want to venture out of their homes. Under constant pressure to pick up and deliver meals before they go cold, these delivery workers toil for some of the lowest wages on offer.

In the past, delivery was an entry-level position, a way to get a foot in the door, like working in the mail room. Today, it’s a business all on its own, with gigantic public companies such as Uber and Deliveroo providc-ing delivery services for restaurant owners. With that outsourcing, delivery has become a dead-end job. Success means only that you get to work the day shift.

Just a few years ago, we believed these jobs would soon be gone—wiped out by Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving systems. Yet, as engineers better understand the immense challenges of driv-

ing on roads crowded with some very irrational human operators, a task that once seemed straight-forward now looks nearly intractable.

Other tasks long thought to be beyond automation have recently taken great leaps forward, though. In June, for example, GitHub previewed its AI pair pro-grammer, Copilot: a set of virtual eyes that works with developers to keep their code clean and logically correct. Copilot wouldn’t come up with a sophisti-cated algorithm on its own, but it shows us how auto-mation can make weak programmers stronger.

It won’t be long before massive AI language models like Microsoft and Nvidia’s Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLG) make short work of basic business copywriting. Other writing jobs—digesting materials to extract key details, expressing them in accessible language, then preparing them for publication—are also surreno-dering to automation. The elements for this trans-formative leap are already falling into place.

While it’s unlikely that most programming or copywriting will be done by machines anytime soon, an increasing portion will. Those professions now face real competition from automation. Paradoxi-cally, bicycle-based delivery looks likely to need a human mind for at least the next several years.

In a world where software eats everything in sight, those bits that can’t be digested continue to require human attention. That attention requires people’s time—for which they can earn a living. What we pay people for performing their jobs will increasingly be measured against the cost of using a machine to perform that task. Some white-collar workers will, no doubt, suffer from these new forms of competition from machines.

A century ago, farm labor faced a similar deval-uation, as agriculture became mechanized. And while countless manufacturing jobs have suc-cumbed to factory automation over the decades, Tesla production hiccups reveal what happens when you try to push automation too far on the factory floor. As the history of the Luddites so aptly demons-strates, the tension between machines and human labor isn’t new—but it’s growing again now, this time striking at the heart of knowledge work.

To stay one step ahead of the machines, we’ll need to find the hard bits and maintain the skills required to keep crunching on them. Creativity, insight, wisdom, and empathy—these aptitudes are wholly human and look to remain that way into the future. If we lean into these qualities, we can resist the competitive rise of the machines. n

While it’s unlikely that most pro-gramming or copywriting will be done by machines anytime soon, those professions now face real compe-tition from automation.

Illustration by Harry Campbell DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  21

Copenhagen Suborbitals volunteers use a tank of argon gas to fill a tube within which engine elements are joined together [top left], weld a component of the Nexø II rocket [top right], work on a fuel tank for the next-gen Spica rocket [bottom right], and examine fuel injector elements under a microscope [bottom left].

C A N A D I Y R O C K E T B L A S T A N A M A T E U R I N T O S P A C E ?

22  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM RIGHT: CARSTEN OLSEN (3); SARUNAS KAZLAUSKAS

22  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

CR

OW

DFU

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ED

TH

E F

IRST

AST

RO

NA

UTC A N A D I Y R O C K E T B L A S T A N A M A T E U R I N T O S P A C E ?

BY MADS STENFATT

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  23

That successful mission in August 2018 was a huge step toward our goal of sending an amateur astronaut to the edge of space aboard one of our DIY rockets. We’re now building the Spica rocket to fulfill that mission, and we hope to launch a crewed rocket about 10 years from now.

Copenhagen Suborbitals is the world’s only crowdsourced crewed spaceflight program, funded to the tune of almost US $100,000 per year by hundreds of generous donors around the world. Our project is staffed by a motley crew of volunteers who have a wide variety of day jobs. We have plenty of engi-neers, as well as people like me, a pricing manager with a skydiving hobby. I’m also one of three candidates for the astronaut position.

We’re in a new era of spaceflight: The national space agen-cies are no longer the only game in town, and space is becoming more accessible. Rockets built by commercial players like Blue Origin are now bringing private citizens into orbit. That said, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic are all backed by bil-lionaires with enormous resources, and they have all expressed intentions to sell flights for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Copenhagen Suborbitals has a very different vision. We believe that spaceflight should be available to anyone who’s willing to put in the time and effort.

C openhagen Suborbitals was founded in 2008 by a self-taught engineer and a space architect who had previ-ously worked for NASA. From the beginning, the

mission was clear: crewed spaceflight. Both founders left the organization in 2014, but by then the project had about 50 vol-unteers and plenty of momentum. (Five current volunteers are

pictured on the cover of this magazine: from left, author Mads Stenfatt, Martin Hedegaard Petersen, Jørgen Skyt, Carsten Olsen, and Anna Olsen.)

The group took as its founding principle that the challenges involved in building a crewed spacecraft on the cheap are all engineering problems that can be solved, one at a time, by a diligent team of smart and dedicated people. When people ask me why we’re doing this, I sometimes answer, “Because we can.”

Our goal is to reach the Kármán line, which defines the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, 100 kilometers above sea level. The astronaut who reaches that altitude will have several minutes of silence and weight-lessness after the engines cut off and will enjoy a breathtaking view. But it won’t be an easy ride. During the descent, the capsule will experience external temperatures of 400 °C and g-forces of 3.5 as it hurtles through the air at speeds of up to 3,500 kilometers per hour.

I joined the group in 2011, after the organization had already moved from a maker space inside a decommissioned ferry to a hangar near the Copenhagen waterfront. Earlier that year, I had watched Copenhagen Suborbital’s first launch, in which the HEAT-1X rocket took off from a mobile launch platform in the Baltic Sea—but unfortunately crash-landed in the ocean when most of its parachutes failed to deploy. I brought to the organization some basic knowledge of sports parachutes gained during my years of skydiving, which I hoped would translate into helpful skills.

The team’s next milestone came in 2013, when we success-fully launched the Sapphire rocket, our first rocket to include

IT WAS ONE OF THE PRETTIEST SIGHTS I HAVE EVER SEEN: our homemade rocket floating down from the sky, slowed by a white-and-orange parachute that I had worked on during many nights at the dining room table. The 6.7-meter-tall Nexø II rocket was powered by a bipropellant engine designed and constructed by the Copenhagen Suborbitals team. The engine mixed ethanol and liquid oxygen together to produce a thrust of 5 kilonewtons, and the rocket soared to a height of 6,500 meters. Even more important, it came back down in one piece.

FROM LEFT: ESKIL J. NIELSEN-FERREIRA; CARSTEN OLSEN; JEV OLSEN

24  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

F or the Nexø II launch in August 2018, our launch site was 30 km east of Bornholm, Denmark’s easternmost island, in a part of the Baltic Sea used by the Danish navy for

military exercises. We left Bornholm’s Nexø harbor at 1 a.m. to reach the designated patch of ocean in time for a 9 a.m. launch, the time approved by Swedish air traffic control. (While our boats were in international waters, Sweden has oversight of the airspace above that part of the Baltic Sea.) Many of our crew members had spent the entire previous day testing the rocket’s various systems and got no sleep before the launch. We were running on coffee.

When the Nexø II blasted off, separating neatly from the launch tower, we all cheered. The rocket continued on its tra-jectory, jettisoning its nose cone when it reached its apogee of

guidance and navigation systems. Its navigation computer used a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope to keep track of its location, and its thrust-control system kept the rocket on the correct trajectory by moving four servo-mounted copper jet vanes that were inserted into the exhaust assembly.

Both the HEAT-1X and the Sapphire rockets were fueled with a combination of solid polyurethane and liquid oxygen. We were keen to develop a bipropellant rocket engine that mixed liquid ethanol and liquid oxygen, because such liquid-propellant engines are both efficient and powerful. The HEAT-2X rocket, scheduled to launch in late 2014, was meant to demonstrate that technology. Unfortunately, its engine went up in flames in a static test-firing some weeks before the scheduled launch. That test was supposed to be a controlled 90-second burn; instead, because of a welding error, much of the ethanol gushed into the combustion chamber in just a few seconds, resulting in a massive conflagration. I was standing a few hundred meters away, and even from that distance I felt the heat on my face.

The HEAT-2X rocket’s engine was rendered inoperable, and the mission was canceled. While it was a major disap-pointment, we learned some valuable lessons. Until then, we’d been basing our designs on our existing capabilities—the tools in our workshop and the people on the project. The failure forced us to take a step back and consider what new technol-ogies and skills we would need to master to reach our end goal. That rethinking led us to design the relatively small Nexø I and Nexø II rockets to demonstrate key technologies such as the parachute system, the bipropellant engine, and the pressure regulation assembly for the tanks.

In 2018, the Nexø II rocket launched successfully [left] and returned safely to the Baltic Sea [far left].Below: During a test-firing in 2014, a welding error in the HEAT-2X rocket’s engine caused a massive fireball that destroyed the rocket.

NexoII info info. Igenimos rehendi con nosantius,15–20 words Abem et,equi ommo ri sia ima coTus, quet aute excreFicte omnis 15–20 words

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  25

Volunteer Jacob

Larsen holds a brass fuel injector that performed well in a 2021 engine test.

THE SPICA ASTRONAUT’S 15-MINUTE

RIDE TO THE STARS WILL BE THE PRODUCT OF MORE THAN TWO DECADES

OF WORK.

6,500 meters, and sending telemetry data back to our mission control ship all the while. As it began to descend, it first deployed its ballute, a balloon-like parachute used to stabilize spacecraft at high altitudes, and then deployed its main parachute, which brought it gently down to the ocean waves.

The launch brought us one step closer to mastering the logistics of launching and landing at sea. For this launch, we were also testing our ability to predict the rocket’s path. I cre-ated a model that estimated a splashdown 4.2 km east of the launch platform; it actually landed 4.0 km to the east. This controlled water landing—our first under a fully inflated parachute—was an important proof of concept, since a soft landing is an absolute imperative for any crewed mission.

The Nexø II’s engine, which we called the BPM5, was one of the few components we hadn’t machined entirely in our workshop; a Danish company made the most complicated engine parts. But when those parts arrived in our workshop shortly before the launch date, we realized that the exhaust nozzle was a little bit misshapen. We didn’t have time to order a new part, so one of our volunteers, Jacob Larsen, used a sledgehammer to pound it into shape. The engine didn’t look pretty—we nicknamed it the Franken-Engine—but it worked. Since the Nexø II’s flight, we’ve test-fired that engine more than 30 times, sometimes pushing it beyond its design limits, but we haven’t killed it yet.

That mission also demonstrated our new dynamic pressure regulation (DPR) system, which helped us control the flow of fuel into the combustion chamber. The Nexø I had used a sim-pler system called pressure blowdown, in which the fuel tanks were one-third filled with pressurized gas to drive the liquid

fuel into the chamber. With DPR, the tanks are filled to capacity with fuel and linked by a set of control valves to a separate tank of helium gas under high pressure. That setup lets us regulate the amount of helium gas flowing into the tanks to push fuel into the combustion chamber, enabling us to program in different amounts of thrust at different points during the rocket’s flight.

The 2018 Nexø II mission proved that our design and tech-nology were fundamentally sound. It was time to start working on the human-rated Spica rocket.

W ith its crew capsule, the Spica rocket will measure 13 meters high and will have a gross liftoff weight of 4,000 kilograms, of which 2,600 kg will be fuel. It

will be, by a significant margin, the largest rocket ever built by amateurs.

Its engine, the 100-kN BPM100, uses technologies we mas-tered for the BPM5, with a few improvements. Like the prior design, it uses regenerative cooling in which some of the fuel passes through channels around the combustion chamber to limit the engine’s temperature. To push fuel into the chamber, it uses a combination of the simple pressure blowdown method in the first phase of flight and the DPR system, which gives us finer control over the rocket’s thrust. The engine parts will be stainless steel, and we hope to make most of them ourselves out of rolled sheet metal. The trickiest part, the double-curved “throat” section that connects the combustion chamber to the exhaust nozzle, requires computer-controlled machining equipment that we don’t have. Luckily, we have good industry contacts who can help out. C

LOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM RIGHT: CARSTEN OLSEN (3); CASPAR STANLEY; CARSTEN BRANDT

26  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

A volunteer helps assemble the two fuel tanks for the Spica rocket [left]. Bianca Diana [right] works on a drone she’s using to test a new guidance system for the Spica rocket. P

HOTO CREDIT FIRST LASTNAME

Artist renderings show the Spica rocket [top] and the crew capsule [bottom] in which the astronaut will be seated.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  27

One major change was the switch from the Nexø II’s showerhead-style fuel injector to a coaxial-swirl fuel injector. The showerhead injector had about 200 very small fuel chan-nels. It was tough to manufacture, because if something went wrong when we were making one of those channels—say, the drill got stuck—we had to throw the whole thing away. In a coaxial-swirl injector, the liquid fuels come into the chamber as two rotating liquid sheets, and as the sheets collide, they’re atomized to create a propellant that combusts. Our swirl injec-tor uses about 150 swirler elements, which are assembled into one structure. This modular design should be easier to manu-facture and test for quality assurance.

In April of this year, we ran static tests of several types of injectors. We first did a trial with a well-understood showerhead injector to establish a baseline, then tested brass swirl injectors made by traditional machine milling as well as steel swirl injec-tors made by 3D printing. We were satisfied overall with the performance of both swirl injectors, and we’re still analyzing the data to determine which functioned better. However, we did see some combustion instability—namely, some oscillation in the flames between the injector and the engine’s throat, a

potentially dangerous phenomenon. We have a good idea of the cause of these oscillations, and we’re confident that a few design tweaks can solve the problem.

We’ll soon commence building a full-scale BPM100 engine, which will incorporate a new guidance system for the rocket. Our prior rockets, within their engines’ exhaust nozzles, had metal vanes that we would move to change the angle of thrust. But those vanes generated drag within the exhaust stream and reduced effective thrust by about 10 percent. The new design has gimbals that swivel the entire engine back and forth to control the thrust vector. As further support for our belief that tough engineering problems can be solved by smart and dedi-cated people, our gimbal system was designed and tested by a 21-year-old undergraduate student from the Netherlands named Jop Nijenhuis, who used the gimbal design as his thesis project (for which he got the highest possible grade).

We’re using the same guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) computers that we used in the Nexø rockets. One new challenge is the crew capsule; once the capsule separates from the rocket, we’ll have to control each part on its own to bring them both back down to Earth in the desired orientation. When separation occurs, the GNC computers for the two components will need to understand that the parameters for optimal flight have changed. But from a software point of view, that’s a minor problem compared to those we’ve solved already.

My specialty is parachute design. I’ve worked on the ballute, which will inflate at an altitude of 70 km to slow the crewed capsule during its high-speed initial descent, and the main parachutes, which will inflate when the capsule is 4 km above the ocean. We’ve tested both types by having skydivers jump out of planes with the parachutes, most recently in a 2019 test of the ballute. The pandemic forced us to pause our parachute testing, but we should resume soon.

For the drogue parachute that will deploy from the booster rocket, my first prototype was based on a design called F

ROM RIGHT: CARSTEN OLSEN; MADS STENFATT; THOMAS PEDERSEN (2)

Copenhagen Suborbitals designed the BPM100 engine [bottom] for use in the Spica rocket. This engine will replace an old showerhead-style fuel injector [top, right] with a coaxial-swirl injector [top, left], which will be easier to manufacture. For the parachute that will deploy from the Spica’s booster rocket, the team tested a small prototype of a ribbon parachute [right].

28  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Supersonic X, which is a parachute that looks somewhat like a flying onion and is very easy to make. However, I reluctantly switched to ribbon parachutes, which have been more thor-oughly tested in high-stress situations and found to be more stable and robust. I say “reluctantly” because I knew how much work it would be to assemble such a device. I first made a 1.24-meter-diameter parachute that had 27 ribbons going across 12 panels, each attached in three places. So on that small proto-type, I had to sew 972 connections. A full-scale version will have 7,920 connection points. I’m trying to keep an open mind about this challenge, but I also wouldn’t object if further testing shows the Supersonic X design to be sufficient for our purposes.

W e’ve tested two crew capsules in past missions: the Tycho Brahe in 2011 and the Tycho Deep Space in 2012. The next-generation Spica crew capsule won’t

be spacious, but it will be big enough to hold a single astronaut, who will remain seated for the 15 minutes of flight (and for two hours of preflight checks). The first spacecraft we’re building is a heavy steel “boilerplate” capsule, a basic prototype that we’re using to arrive at a practical layout and design. We’ll also use this model to test hatch design, overall resistance to pressure and vacuum, and the aerodynamics and hydro-dynamics of the shape, as we want the capsule to splash down into the sea with minimal shock to the astronaut inside. Once we’re happy with the boilerplate design, we’ll make the light-weight flight version.

Three members of the Copenhagen Suborbitals team are currently candidates to be the astronaut in our first crewed mission—me, Carsten Olsen, and his daughter, Anna Olsen. We all understand and accept the risks involved in flying into space on a homemade rocket. In our day-to-day operations, we astronaut candidates don’t receive any special treatment or training. Our one extra responsibility thus far has been sitting in the crew capsule’s seat to check its dimensions. Since

our first crewed flight is still a decade away, the candidate list may well change. As for me, I think there’s considerable glory in just being part of the mission and helping to build the rocket that will bring the first amateur astronaut into space. Whether or not I end up being that astronaut, I’ll forever be proud of our achievements.

People may wonder how we get by on a shoestring budget of about $100,000 a year—particularly when they learn that half of our income goes to paying rent on our workshop. We keep costs down by buying standard off-the-shelf parts as much as possible, and when we need custom designs, we’re lucky to work with companies that give us generous discounts to sup-port our project. We launch from international waters, so we don’t have to pay a launch facility. When we travel to Bornholm for our launches, each volunteer pays his or her own way, and we stay in a sports club, sleeping on mats on the floor and showering in the changing rooms. I sometimes joke that our budget is about one-tenth what NASA spends on coffee. Yet it may well be enough to do the job.

We had intended to launch Spica for the first time in the summer of 2021, but our schedule was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed our workshop for many months. Now we’re hoping for a test launch in the summer of 2022, when conditions on the Baltic Sea will be relatively tame. For this preliminary test of Spica, we’ll fill the fuel tanks partway and will aim to send the rocket to a height of around 30 to 50 km.

If that flight is a success, in the next test, Spica will carry more fuel and soar higher. If the 2022 flight fails, we’ll figure out what went wrong, fix the problems, and try again. It’s remarkable to think that the Spica astronaut’s eventual 15-minute ride to the stars will be the product of more than two decades of work. But we know our supporters are counting down until the historic day when an amateur astronaut will climb aboard a homemade rocket and wave goodbye to Earth, ready to take a giant leap for DIY-kind. n

WE BELIEVE THAT SPACEFLIGHT SHOULD BE AVAILABLE TO ANYONE WHO’S WILLING TO PUT IN THE TIME AND EFFORT.

Spica’s two fuel tanks were manufactured in the Copenhagen Suborbitals workshop using plate steel.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  29

T H E SMARTLY D R E S S E D S PAC E C R A F T

30  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

WRAPPED IN SENSOR-RICH ELECTRONIC TEXTILES, SPACE STRUCTURES COULD DOUBLE AS SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS

By Juliana Cherston & Joseph A. Paradiso

Photography by Bob O’Connor

MIT’s Juliana Cherston holds a sensored Beta-cloth swatch like the one that will fly on board the International Space Station in 2022. The swatch [far left] has three black fiber sensors woven into the material.

THIS COMING FEBRUARY, the Cygnus NG-17 space-craft will launch from NASA Wallops, in Virginia, on a routine resupply mission to the International Space Station. Amid the many tonnes of standard crew supplies, spacewalk equipment, computer hardware,

and research experiments will be one unusual package: a pair of electronic textile swatches embedded with impact and vibration sensors. Soon after the spacecraft’s arrival at the ISS, a robotic arm will mount the samples onto the exterior of Alpha Space’s Materials ISS Experiment (MISSE) facility, and control-room operators back on Earth will feed power to the samples.

For the next six months, our team will conduct the first operational test of sensor-laden electronic fabrics in space, collecting data in real time as the sensors endure the harsh weather of low Earth orbit. We also hope that microscopic dust or debris, traveling at least an order of magnitude faster than sound, will strike the fabric and trigger the sensors.

Our eventual aim is to use such smart electronic textiles to study cosmic dust, some of which has interplanetary or even interstellar origins. Imagine if the protective fabric covering a spacecraft could double as an astrophysics experiment, but without adding excessive mass, volume, or power require-ments. What if this smart skin could also measure the cumu-lative damage caused by orbital space debris and micrometeoroids too small to be tracked by radar? Could sensored textiles in pressured spacesuits give astronauts a sense of touch, as if the fabric were their own skin? In each case, electronic fabrics sensitive to vibrations and charge could serve as a foundational technology.

Already, engineered fabrics serve crucial functions here on Earth. Geotextiles made of synthetic polymers are buried deep underground to strengthen land embankments. Surgical meshes reinforce tissue and bone during invasive medical procedures.

In space, the outer walls of the ISS are wrapped in a protec-tive engineered textile that gives the station its white color. Called Beta cloth, the woven fabric covers the station’s metal shell and shields the spacecraft from overheating and erosion. Beta cloth can also be found on the exterior of Apollo-era space-suits and Bigelow Aerospace’s next-generation inflatable hab-itats. Until it is possible to substantially alter the human body itself, resilient textiles like this will continue to serve as a crucial boundary—a second skin—protecting human explorers and spacecraft from the extremes of space.

Now it’s time to bring some smarts to this skin.

OUR LAB, the Responsive Environments Group at MIT, has been working for well over a decade on embedding distributed sensor networks into flexible substrates. In 2018, we were knee-deep in developing a far-out concept to grapple an asteroid with an electronic web, which would allow a network of hundreds or thousands of tiny robots to crawl across the surface as they characterized the asteroid’s materials. The technology was curi-ous to contemplate but unlikely to be deployed anytime soon.

During a visit to our lab, Hajime Yano, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, suggested a nearer-term possibility: to turn the Beta cloth blanket used on long-duration spacecraft into a science experiment. Thus began a collaboration that has J

AXA/SPACE BD (4)

32  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

so far resulted in multiple rounds of prototyping and ground testing and two experiments in space.

One of the tests is the upcoming launch aboard the Cygnus NG-17, funded by the ISS National Laboratory. As the ISS orbits Earth, and the local space environment changes, we’ll be trig-gering our sensors with known excitations to measure how their sensitivity varies over time. Concurrently, we’ll take impedance measurements, which will let us peek into the inter-nal electrical properties of the fibers. Any changes to the pro-tective capabilities of the Beta fabric will be picked up using temperature sensors. If the system functions as designed, we may even detect up to 20 micrometeoroid impacts across the fabric’s 10-by-10-centimeter area. A triggering system will flag any interesting data to be streamed to Earth in real time.

A second in-space experiment is already underway. For more than a year, a wider range of our smart-fabric swatches has been quietly tucked away on a different section of the ISS’s walls, on Space BD’s Exposed Experiment Handrail Attachment Mechanism (ExHAM) facility. In this experiment, funded by the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the samples aren’t being powered. Instead, we’re monitoring their exposure to the space environment, which can be tough on materials. They endure repeated cycles of extreme heat and cold, radiation, and material-eroding atomic oxygen. Through real-time videography sessions we’ve been conduct-ing with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), we’ve already seen signs of some anticipated discoloration of our samples. Once the samples return to Earth in late January via the SpaceX CRS-24 rocket, we’ll conduct a more

thorough evaluation of the fabrics’ sensor performance.By demonstrating how to sleekly incorporate sensors into

mission-critical subsystems, we hope to encourage the wide-spread adoption of electronic textiles as scientific instrumentation.

ELECTRONIC TEXTILES got an early and auspicious start in space. In the 1960s, the software for the Apollo guidance computer was stored in a woven substrate called core rope memory. Wires were fed through conductive loops to indicate 1s and around loops to indicate 0s, achieving a memory density of 72 kilo bytes per cubic foot (or about 2,500 kilobytes per cubic meter).

Around the same time, a company called Woven Electronics (now part of Collins Aerospace) began developing fabric circuit board prototypes that were considered well ahead of their time. For a fleeting moment in computing, woven fabric circuits and core rope memory were competitive with silicon semiconduc-tor technology.

Electronic fabrics then fell into a long hiatus, until interest in wearable technology in the 1990s revived the idea. The MIT Media Lab pioneered some early prototypes, working, for instance, with Levi’s in the late ’90s on a jean jacket with an embroidered MIDI keyboard. Since then, researchers and com-panies have created a plethora of sensing technologies in fabric, especially for health-related wearables, like flexible sensors worn on the skin that monitor your well-being through your sweat, heart rate, and body temperature.

More recently, sophisticated fiber sensors have been push-ing the performance and capabilities of electronic textiles even

In the Japanese space agency’s control room [far left], engineers conduct a video inspection of sensored fabrics that have been flying on the ISS since October 2020. The swatches are mounted on the space station’s Exposed Experiment Handrail Attachment Mechanism (ExHAM) facility [3 photos above]. The experiment is studying the resiliency of different types of fabric sensors when they’re exposed to the harsh environment of low Earth orbit. The samples will be returned to Earth early next year for more careful analysis.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  33

further. Our collaborators in the Fibers@MIT group, for exam-ple, use a manufacturing technique called thermal drawing, in which a centimeter-thick sandwich of materials is heated and stretched to submillimeter thickness, like pulling a multicolored taffy. Incredibly, the internal structure of the resulting fiber remains highly precise, yielding functional devices such as sensors for vibration, light, and temperature that can be woven directly into fabrics.

But this exciting progress hasn’t yet made its way to space textiles. Today’s spacesuits aren’t too different from the one that Alan Shepard wore inside Freedom 7 in 1961. Recent suit designs have instead focused on improving the astronaut’s mobility and temperature regulation. They might have touch-screen-compatible fingertips, but that’s about as sophis-ticated as the functionality gets.

Meanwhile, Beta cloth has been used on space habitats in more or less its present form for more than a half century. A smattering of fabric antennas and fiber-optic strain sensors have been developed for rigid composites. But little has been done to add electronic sensory function to the textiles we use in space.

TO JUMP-START THIS RESEARCH, our group has tackled three areas: We’ve built fabric sensors, we’ve worked with spe-cialized facilities to obtain a baseline of the materials’ sensi-tivity to impact, and we’ve designed instrumentation to test these fabrics in space.

We started by upgrading Beta cloth, which is a Teflon -impregnated fabric made of flexible fiberglass filaments that are so densely woven that the material feels almost like a thick sheet of paper. To this protective layer, we wanted to add the ability to detect the tiny submillimeter or micrometer-scale impacts from cosmic dust. These microparticles move fast, at speeds of up to 50 kilometers per second, with an average speed

of around 10 km/s. A 10-micrometer iron-dominant particle traveling at that speed contains about 75 microjoules of kinetic energy. It isn’t much energy, but it can still carry quite a punch when concentrated to a small impact area. Studying the kine-matics and spatial distributions of such impacts can give sci-entists insight into the composition and origins of cosmic dust. What’s more, these impacts can cause significant damage to spacecraft, so we’d like to measure how frequent and energetic they are.

What kind of fabric sensors would be sensitive enough to pick up the signals from these minuscule impacts? Early on, we settled on using piezoelectric fibers. Piezoelectric materials produce surface charge when subject to mechanical deforma-tion. When a piezoelectric layer is sandwiched between two electrodes, it forms a sensor that can translate mechanical vibration into current. Piezoelectric impact sensors have been used on spacecraft before, but never as part of a fabric or as dispersed fibers.

One of the chief requirements for piezoelectrics is that the electric dipoles inside the material must all be lined up in order for the charge to accumulate. To permanently align the dipoles—a process called poling—we have to apply a substantial electric field of about 100 kilovolts for every millimeter of thickness.

Early on, we experimented with weaving bare polyvinylidene difluoride yarn into Beta cloth. This single-material yarn has the advantage of being as fine and flexible as the fibers in cloth-ing and is also radiation- and abrasion-resistant. Plus, the fiber-drawing process creates a crystalline phase structure that encourages poling. Applying a hefty voltage to the fabric, though, caused any air trapped in the porous material to become electrically conductive, inducing miniature lightning bolts across the material and spoiling the poling process. We tried a slew of tricks to minimize the arcing, and we tested piezoelectric ink coatings applied to the fabric. A

LLISON GOODE/AEGIS AEROSPACE

34  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Ultimately, though, we determined that multimaterial fiber sensors were preferable to single-material yarns, because the dipole alignment needs to occur only across the very tiny and precise distances within each fiber sensor, rather than across a fabric’s thickness or across a fabric coating’s uneven surface. We chose two different fiber sensors. One of the fibers is a piezoceramic nanocomposite fiber designed by Fibers@MIT, and the other is a polymer we harvested from commercial piezoelectric cabling, then modified to be suitable for fabric integration. We coated these fiber sensors in an elastomeric conductive ink, as well as a white epoxy that keeps the fibers cool and resists oxidation.

To produce our fabric, we worked with space-textile manufac-turer JPS Composite Materials, in Anderson, S.C. The company helped insert our two types of piezoelectric fibers at intervals across the fabric and ensured that our version of Beta cloth still adhered to NASA specifications. We have also worked with the Rhode Island School of Design on fabric manufacturing.

To test the sensitivity of our fabric, we have been using the Laser-Induced Particle Impact Test (LIPIT) platform designed by Keith Nelson’s group at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nano-technologies. This benchtop apparatus is designed for inves-tigating how materials respond to microparticle impacts, such as in needle-free drug delivery and cold-sprayed industrial

Juliana Cherston prepares a smart-fabric system in the clean room at Alpha Space in Houston [left]. Electronics in the silver flight hardware box [above] stream data to the computer in the blue box. The system, set for launch in February, will be mounted on the Materials ISS Experiment facility. At right, the green laser in the Laser-Induced Particle Impact Test facility at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies accelerates particles to supersonic speeds.

BOB O’CONNOR

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  35

coatings. In our tests, we used the platform’s high-speed par-ticles to simulate space dust.

In a typical experiment, we spread steel particles ranging from a few micrometers to tens of micrometers onto gold film atop a glass substrate, which we call a launchpad. For each shot, a laser pulse vaporizes the gold film, exerting an impulsive force on the particles and accelerating them to speeds of many hun-dreds of meters per second. A high-speed camera captures the impact of the gold particles on our target fabric swatch every few nanoseconds, equivalent to hundreds of millions of frames per second.

So far, we’ve been able to detect electrical signals not only when the particles struck a sensor’s surface but also when par-ticles struck 1 or 2 cm away from the sensor. In some camera footage, it’s even possible to see the acoustic wave created by the indirect impact propagating along the fabric’s surface and eventually reaching the piezoelectric fiber. This promising data suggests that we can space out our sensors across the fabric and still be able to detect the impacts.

Now we’re working to nail down just how sensitive the fabric is—that is, what ranges of particle mass and velocity it can register. We’re soon scheduled to test our fabric at a Van de Graaff accelerator, which can propel particles of a few microm-eters in diameter to speeds of tens of kilometers per second, which is more in line with interstellar dust velocities.

Beyond piezoelectrics, we’re also interested in detecting the plumes of electric charge that form when a particle strikes the fabric at high speed. Those plumes contain clues about the impactor’s constituent elements. One of our samples on the

ISS is an electrically conductive synthetic fur made of silvered Vectran fibers. More typically used to reinforce electrical cables, badminton string, and bicycle tires, Vectran is also a key com-ponent in inflatable spacecraft. In our case, we manufactured it like a carpet or a fur coat. We believe this design may be well suited to catching the plumes of charge ejected from impact, which could make for an even more sensitive detector.

MEANWHILE, THERE’S GROWING INTEREST in porting sen-sored textiles to spacesuits. A few members in our group have worked on a preliminary concept that uses fabrics containing B

OB O’CONNOR (5)

36  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

vibration, pressure, proximity, and touch sensors to discrimi-nate between a glove, metallic equipment, and rocky terrain—just the sorts of surfaces that astronauts wearing pressurized suits would encounter. This sensor data is then mapped to haptic actuators on the astronauts’ own skin, allowing wearers to vividly sense their surroundings right through their suits.

How else might a sensored fabric enhance human engage-ment with the space environment? For long-duration mis-sions, explorers residing for months inside a spacecraft or habitat will crave experiential variety. Fabric and thin-film sensors might detect the space weather just outside a space-craft or habitat and then use that data to alter the lighting and temperature inside. A similar system might even mimic certain external conditions. Imagine feeling a Martian breeze within a habitat’s walls or the touch of a loved one conveyed through a spacesuit.

And in the far future, such fabrics could help advance fron-tier science, allowing massively distributed scientific mea-surements across hundreds of spacecraft throughout the solar system. In particular, we’re fascinated by recent research indicating that dust from a near-Earth supernova explosion is still raining down on our planet. With a wide network of electronic fabrics that are sensitive enough, we could assess the kinematics of this interstellar dust. Because spacecraft

skins face all directions simultaneously, it might be possible to detect the faintest fluctuations in cosmic dust, which will allow scientists to hunt for objects like comet tails, explore the giant cloud of interstellar dust that our solar system is currently traversing—known as the Local Fluff—and maybe even detect microparticles ejected from this million-year-old supernova. To this end, it may be fruitful to deploy sensored fabrics outside the orbital plane of the solar system, where interstellar dust dominates.

To engineer a fabric that can survive extreme conditions, we foresee experimenting with piezoelectric materials that have intrinsic thermal and radiation resilience, such as boron nitride nanotubes, as well as devices that have better intrinsic noise tolerance, including sensors based on glass fibers. We also envision building a system that can intelligently adapt to local conditions and mission priorities, by self-regulating its sampling rates, signal gains, and so on.

Space-resilient electronic fabrics may still be nascent, but the work is deeply cross-cutting. Textile designers, materials scien-tists, astrophysicists, astronautical engineers, electrical engi-neers, artists, planetary scientists, and cosmologists will all have a role to play in reimagining the exterior skins of future space-craft and spacesuits. This skin, the boundary of person and the demarcation of place, is real estate ripe for development. n

To make a piezoelectric fiber sensor [2 photos, top left], researchers at the Fibers@MIT group sandwich materials together and then heat and stretch them like taffy. The faint copper wires are used to make electrical contact with the materials inside the fiber. The fibers can then be woven into Beta cloth. A replica [2 photos, top right] of the smart-textile payload that’s launching in February shows the electronics and internal layers. At bottom [left to right] Juliana Cherston and Joe Paradiso of MIT’s Responsive Environments Group and Wei Yan of the Fibers@MIT group are part of the team behind the smart-textile experiment.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  37

The Tandem insulin pump, no bigger than a mobile phone, infuses insulin under the skin at the command of Control-IQ software, which has received blood-glucose data from a Dexcom G6 sensor.

MATT HARBICHT/TANDEM DIABETES CARE/GETTY IMAGES

Creating the

ArtificialPancreas

38  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

This wearable device senses blood glucose and administers insulin accordinglyBy Boris Kovatchev & Anna Kovatcheva

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  39

40  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose control. Neverthe-less, the artificial pancreas is a triumph of biotechnology.

It is a triumph of hope, as well. We well remember a morning in late December of 2005, when experts in diabetes technol-ogy and bioengineering gathered in the Lister Hill Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. By that point, existing technology enabled people with diabetes to track their blood-glucose levels and use those read-ings to estimate the amount of insulin they needed. The problem was how to remove human intervention from the equation. A distinguished scientist took the podium and explained that biology’s glucose-regulation mechanism was far too complex to be artificially replicated. We disagreed, and after 14 years of work we were able to prove the scientist wrong.

It was yet another confirmation of Arthur Clarke’s First Law: “When a dis-tinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very prob-ably wrong.”

In a healthy endocrine system, the fasting blood-glucose level is around 80 to 100 milligrams per deciliter of

blood. The entire blood supply of a typi-cal adult contains 4 or 5 grams of sugar—roughly as much as in the paper packet that restaurants offer with coffee. Con-suming carbohydrates, either as pure sugar or as a starch such as bread, causes blood-glucose levels to rise. A normally functioning pancreas recognizes the incoming sugar rush and secretes insulin to allow the body’s cells to absorb it so

In some ways, this is a family story. Peter Kovatchev was a naval engineer who raised his son, Boris, as a problem solver, and who built model ships with his granddaughter, Anna. He also suffered from a form of diabetes in which the pancreas cannot make enough insulin. To control the concentration of glucose in his blood, he had to inject insulin several times a day, using a syringe that he kept in a small metal box in our family’s refrigerator. But although he tried to administer the right amount of insu-lin at the right times, his blood-glucose control was quite poor. He passed away from diabetes-related complications in 2002.

one eye on their blood-glucose levels, which they measured many times a day by pricking their fingers for drops of blood. It was easily the most demanding therapy that patients have ever been required to administer to themselves.

No longer: The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be com-pared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the tempera-ture of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still “hybrid,” meaning that users are required to esti-mate the carbohydrates in a meal they’re

Boris now conducts research on bio-engineered substitutes for the pancreas; Anna is a writer and a designer.

A person who requires insulin must walk a tightrope. Blood-glucose concen-tration can swing dramatically, and it is particularly affected by meals and exer-cise. If it falls too low, the person may faint; if it rises too high and stays ele-vated for too long, the person may go into a coma. To avoid repeated episodes of low blood glucose, patients in the past would often run their blood glucose somewhat high, laying themselves open to long-term complications, such as nerve damage, blindness, and heart dis-ease. And patients always had to keep

The original artificial pancreas, called the Biostator, is shown here in hospital use in about 1977. It delivered insulin and glucose directly into the veins and could not be adapted to home use.

WILLIAM CLARKE/UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

LOW BLOODGLUCOSE

HIGH BLOODGLUCOSE

PANCREAS

GLUCAGON IS RELEASEDBY ALPHA CELLSOF THE PANCREAS

NORMAL BLOOD

THE LIVER RELEASESGLUCOSE INTO THE BLOOD FAT CELLS TAKE IN

GLUCOSE FROM THE BLOOD

INSULIN IS RELEASEDBY BETA CELLSOF THE PANCREAS

INFUSION SET

INSULINSENSOR

FOOD

STOMACH

PANCREAS

INSULIN ENTERSTHE BLOODSTREAM

GLUCOSE ENTERSTHE BLOODSTREAM

DIGESTION BREAKS FOODDOWN INTO GLUCOSE

INTESTINE

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  41

that it can be used as energy or stored for such use later on. This process brings the glucose level back to normal.

However, in people with type 1 or insulin-requiring type 2 diabetes—of whom there are nearly 8.5 million in the United States alone—the pancreas produces either no insulin or too little, and the control process must be approx-imated by artificial means.

In the early days, this approximation was very crude. In 1922, insulin was first isolated and administered to diabetic patients in Canada; for decades after, the syringe was the primary tool used to manage diabetes. Because patients in those days had no way to directly measure blood glucose, they had to test their urine, where traces of sugar proved only that blood-glucose levels had already risen to distressingly high levels. Only in 1970 did ambulatory blood-glucose testing become possible; in 1980 it became commercially available. Chemically treated strips reacted with glucose in a drop of blood, changing color in relation to the glucose concentra-tion. Eventually meters equipped with photodiodes and optical sensors were devised to read the strips more precisely.

The first improvement was in the measurement of blood glucose; the second was in the administration of insulin. The first insulin pump had to be worn like a backpack and was impracti-cal for daily use, but it paved the way for all other intravenous blood-glucose con-trol designs, which began to emerge in the 1970s. The first commercial “artifi-cial pancreas” was a refrigerator-size machine called the Biostator, intended for use in hospitals. However, its bulk and its method of infusing insulin directly into a vein prevented it from advancing beyond hospital experiments.

That decade also saw work on more advanced insulin-delivery tools: pumps that could continually infuse insulin through a needle placed under the skin. The first such commercial pump, Dean Kamen’s AutoSyringe, was introduced in the late 1970s, but the patient still had to program it based on periodic blood- glucose measurements done by finger sticks.

Through all this time, patients con-tinued to depend on this method. Finally, in 1999, Medtronic introduced the first continuous glucose monitor portable enough for outpatient use. A thin elec-trode is inserted under the skin with a

The artificial pancreas reproduces the healthy body’s glucose-control system, which begins when carbohydrates are digested into glucose and ferried by the blood to the pancreas. Sensing the increased glucose concentration, the pancreas secretes just enough insulin to enable the body’s cells to absorb the glucose.

Illustration by Chris Philpot

Two control systems based in the pancreas cooperate to keep blood-glucose concentrations within healthy bounds. One uses insulin to lower high levels of glucose, the other uses another hormone, called glucagon, to raise low levels. Today’s artificial pancreas relies on insulin alone, but two-hormone systems are being studied.

42  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

of subcutaneous insulin transport. A more sophisticated approach is the predictive control algorithm, which uses a model of the human metabolic system, such as the one proposed in 1979 by Bergman and Cobelli. The point is to predict future states and thereby partially compensate for the delayed diffusion of subcutaneous insulin into the bloodstream.

Yet another experimental controller uses two hormones—insulin, to lower blood-glucose levels, and glucagon, to raise it. In each of these approaches, modeling work went far to create the conceptual background for building an artificial pancreas. The next step was to actually build it.

To design a controller, you must have a way of testing it, for which biomedical engineering has typically relied on animal trials. But such testing is time consuming and costly. In 2007, our group at the University of Virginia pro-posed using computer-simulation experiments instead.

Together with our colleagues at the University of Padua, in Italy, we created a computer model of glucose-insulin dynamics that operated on 300 virtual subjects with type 1 diabetes. Our model described the interaction over time of glucose and insulin by means of differ-ential equations representing the best available estimates of human physiol-ogy. The parameters of the equation dif-fered from subject to subject. The complete array of all physiologically fea-sible parameter sets described the simu-lated population.

In January 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made the unprecedented decision to accept our simulator as a substitute for animal trials in the preclinical testing of artifi-cial pancreas controllers. The agency agreed that such in silico simulations were sufficient for regulatory approval of inpatient human trials. Suddenly, rapid and cost-effective algorithm development was a possibility. Only three months later, in April of 2008, we began using the controller we’d designed and tested in silico in real people with type 1 diabetes. The UVA/Padua simula-tor is now in use by engineers world-wide, and animal experiments for testing new artificial pancreas algorithms have been abandoned.

Meanwhile, funding was expanding for research on other aspects of the arti-

needle and then connected to the moni-tor, which is worn against the body.

Abbott and Dexcom soon followed with devices presenting glucose data in real time. The accuracy of such meters has consistently improved over the past 20 years, and it is thanks to those advances that an artificial pancreas has become possible.

The ultimate goal is to replicate the entire job of the pancreatic control system, so that patients will no longer have to minister to themselves. But mim-icking a healthy pancreas has proven exceptionally difficult.

Fundamentally, blood-glucose management is a problem in opti-mization, one that is complicated

by meals, exercise, illness, and other external factors that can affect metabo-lism. In 1979, the basis for solving this problem was introduced by the biomed-ical engineers Richard Bergman and Claudio Cobelli, who described the human metabolic system as a series of equations. In practice, however, finding a solution is hard for three main reasons:

Insulin-action delay: In the body, insulin is secreted in the pancreas and shunted directly into the bloodstream. But when injected under the skin, even

the fastest insulins take from 40 minutes to an hour to reach the peak of their action. So the controller of the artificial pancreas must plan on lowering blood glucose an hour from now—it must pre-dict the future.

Inconsistency: Insulin action differs between people, and even within the same person at different times.

Sensor inaccuracy: Even the best continuous glucose monitors make mis-takes, sometimes drifting in a certain direction—showing glucose levels that are either too low or too high, a problem that can last for hours.

What’s more, the system must take into account complex external influ-ences so that it works just as well for a middle-aged man sitting at a desk all day as for a teenager on a snowboard, rock-eting down a mountainside.

To overcome these problems, research-ers have proposed various solutions. The first attempt was a straightforward proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller in which insulin is delivered proportionally to the increase of blood- glucose levels and their rate of change. This method is still used by one commer-cial system, from Medtronic, after many improvements of the algorithm that adjusts the reaction of the PID to the pace

The Minimed 770G artificial pancreas, a hybrid system [right], manages metabolic insulin dosages—it modulates the basal rate but does not administer correction boluses. It is descended from the first such system approved for general use.

LEFT: TANDEM DIABETES CARE; RIGHT: MEDTRONIC

The Control-IQ software predicts the rise in glucose concentration, to above 162 milligrams per decaliter of blood, by calculating extra doses of insulin, called correction boluses [below]. A correction can be administered every hour, as needed. This is in addition to the continuous infusion of insulin throughout the day, known as the basal rate, which is varied every 5 minutes, according to the person’s insulin needs.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  43

ficial pancreas. In 2006 the JDRF (for-merly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) started work on a device at several centers in the U.S. and across Europe; in 2008 the U.S. National Insti-tutes of Health launched a research ini-tiative; and from 2010 to 2014, the European Union–funded AP@Home consortium was active. The global frenzy of rapid prototyping and testing bore fruit: The first outpatient studies took place from September 2011 through Jan-uary 2012 at camps for diabetic children in Israel, Germany, and Slovenia, where children with type 1 diabetes were mon-itored overnight using a laptop-based artificial pancreas system.

Most of these early studies rated the artificial pancreas systems as better than manual insulin therapy in three ways. The patients spent more time within the target range for blood glucose, they had fewer instances of low blood glucose, and they had better control during sleep—a time when low blood-glucose levels can be hard to detect and to manage. But these early trials all relied on laptop computers to run the algo-rithms. The next challenge was to make the systems mobile and wireless, so that they could be put to the test under real-life conditions.

Our team at UVA developed the first mobile system, the Diabetes Assistant, in 2011. It ran on an Android smartphone, had a graphical interface, and was capa-ble of Web-based remote observation. First, we tested it on an outpatient basis in studies that lasted from a few days to 6 months. Next, we tried it on patients who were at high risk because they had suffered from frequent or severe bouts of low blood glucose. Finally we stress-tested the system in children with type 1 diabetes who were learning to ski at a five-day camp.

In 2016, a pivotal trial ended for the first commercial hybrid system—the MiniMed 670G—which automatically controlled the continuous rate of insulin throughout the day but not the addi-

tional doses of insulin that were admin-istered before a meal. The system was cleared by the FDA for clinical use in 2017. Other groups around the world were also testing such systems, with overwhelmingly good results. One 2018 meta-analysis of 40 studies, totaling 1,027 participants, found that patients stayed within their blood-glucose target range (70–180 mg/dL) about 15 percent more of the time while asleep and nearly 10 percent more overall, as compared to patients receiving standard treatment.

Our original machine’s third- generation descendant—based on Control-IQ tech-nology and made by Tandem Diabetes Care in San Diego—underwent a six-month randomized trial in teenagers and adults with type 1 diabetes, ages 14 and up. We published the results in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2019. The system uses a Dexcom G6 con-tinuous glucose monitor—one that no longer requires calibration by finger-stick samples—an insulin pump from Tandem, and the control algorithm originally devel-oped at UVA. The algorithm is built right into the pump, which means the system does not require an external smartphone to handle the computing.

Control-IQ still requires some involvement from the user. Its hybrid control system asks the

person to push a button saying “I am eating” and then enter the estimated amount of carbohydrates; the person can also push a button saying “I am exer-cising.” These interventions aren’t abso-lutely necessary, but they make the control better. Thus, we can say that today’s controllers can be used for full control, but they work better as hybrids.

The system has a dedicated safety module that either stops or slowly atten-uates the flow of insulin whenever the system predicts low blood glucose. Also, it gradually increases insulin dosing overnight, avoiding the tendency toward morning highs and aiming for normal-ized glucose levels by 7 a.m.

The six-month trial tested Control-IQ against the standard treatment, in which the patient does all the work, using infor-mation from a glucose monitor to oper-ate an insulin pump. Participants using Control-IQ spent 11 percent more time in the target blood-glucose range and cut in half—from 2.7 percent to 1.4 percent—the time spent below the low-glucose redline, which is 70 mg/dL. In December 2019, the FDA authorized the clinical use of Control-IQ for patients 14 and up, and our system thus became the first “interoperable automated insulin- dosing controller,” one that can connect to various insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. Patients can now cus-tomize their artificial pancreases.

The FDA approval came almost 14 years to the day after the expert in that Maryland conference room stated that the problem was unsolvable. A month after the approval, Control-IQ was released to users of Tandem’s insulin pump as an online software upgrade. And in June 2020, following another successful clinical trial in children with type 1 diabetes between 6 and 13 years old, the FDA approved Control-IQ for ages 6 and up. Children can benefit from this technology more than any other age group because they are the least able to manage their own insulin dosages.

In April 2021, we published an analysis of 9,400 people using Control-IQ for one year, and this real-life data confirmed the results of the earlier trials. As of 1 Septem-ber 2021, Control-IQ is used by over 270,000 people with diabetes in 21 coun-tries. To date, these people have logged over 30 million days on this system.

One parent wrote Tandem about how eight weeks on the Control-IQ had dras-tically reduced his son’s average blood-glucose concentration. “I have waited and toiled 10 years for this moment to arrive,” he wrote. “Thank you.”

Progress toward better automatic control will be gradual; we anticipate a smooth transition from hybrid to full autonomy, when the patient never inter-venes. Work is now underway on using faster-acting insulins that are in clinical trials. Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action.

What comes next? Well, what else seems impossible today? n

Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action.

Ohm’s Law(V = IR)

Kirchhoff’s

Neural-network processing done in memory with analog circuits will save energy

44  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Better AI:)

BY GEOFFREY W. BURR, ABU SEBASTIAN, TAKASHI ANDO & WILFRIED HAENSCH

Current Law(∑ IIN = ∑ IOUT)

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  45

Machine learning and artificial intel-ligence (AI) have already penetrated so deeply into our life and work that you might have forgotten what interactions with machines used to be like. We used to ask only for precise quantitative answers to questions conveyed with numeric keypads, spreadsheets, or pro-gramming languages: “What is the square root of 10?” “At this rate of interest, what will be my gain over the next five years?”

But in the past 10 years, we’ve become accustomed to machines that can answer the kind of qualitative, fuzzy questions we’d only ever asked of other people: “Will I like this movie?” “How does traf-fic look today?” “Was that transaction fraudulent?”

Deep neural networks (DNNs), sys-tems that learn how to respond to new queries when they’re trained with the right answers to very similar queries, have enabled these new capabilities. DNNs are the primary driver behind the rapidly growing global market for AI hardware, software, and services, valued at US $327.5 billion this year and expected to pass $500 billion in 2024, according to the International Data Corp.

Convolutional neural networks first fueled this revolution by providing superhuman image-recognition capabil-ities. In the last decade, new DNN models for natural-language processing, speech recognition, reinforcement learning, and recommendation systems have enabled many other commercial applications.

But it’s not just the number of appli-cations that’s growing. The size of the networks and the data they need are growing, too. DNNs are inherently scal-able—they provide more reliable answers as they get bigger and as you train them with more data. But doing so comes at a cost. The number of comput-ing operations needed to train the best DNN models grew 1 billionfold between 2010 and 2018, meaning a huge increase in energy consumption. And while each use of an already-trained DNN model on new data—termed inference—requires much less computing, and therefore less energy, than the training itself, the sheer volume of such inference calculations is enormous and increas-ing. If it’s to continue to change people’s lives, AI is going to have to get more efficient.

We think changing from digital to analog computation might be what’s needed. Using nonvolatile memory devices and two fundamental physical laws of electrical engineering, simple circuits can implement a version of deep learning’s most basic calculations that requires mere thousandths of a trillionth of a joule (a femtojoule). There’s a great deal of engineering to do before this tech can take on complex AIs, but we’ve already made great strides and mapped out a path forward.

THE BIGGEST TIME and energy costs in most computers occur when lots of data has to move between external memory and computational resources such as CPUs and GPUs. This is the “von Neu-mann bottleneck,” named after the clas-sic computer architecture that separates memory and logic. One way to greatly reduce the power needed for deep learn-ing is to avoid moving the data—to do the computation out where the data is stored.

DNNs are composed of layers of arti-ficial neurons. Each layer of neurons drives the output of those in the next layer according to a pair of values—the neuron’s “activation” and the synaptic “weight” of the connection to the next neuron.

Most DNN computation is made up of what are called vector-matrix-multiply (VMM) operations—in which a vector (a one-dimensional array of numbers) is multiplied by a two-dimensional array. At

AI’s Fundamental FunctionThe most basic computation in an artificial neural network is called multiply and accumulate. The output of artificial neurons [left, yellow] are multiplied by the weight values connecting them to the next neuron [center, light blue]. That neuron sums its inputs and applies an output function. In analog AI, the multiply function is performed by Ohm’s Law, where the neuron’s output voltage is multiplied by the conductance representing the weight value. The summation at the neuron is done by Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which simply adds all the currents entering a single node.

Insulator

Chalcogenide

PHASE-CHANGE MEMORY

Nonvolatile Memories for Analog AI

OUTPUT =

f(∑WijXi)Activation function

Artificialneurons (i)

Multiply(Ohm’s Law)

Accumulate(Kirchhoff’s Current Law)

Weights of connections ( j)

46  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

the circuit level these are composed of many multiply-accumulate (MAC) oper-ations. For each downstream neuron, all the upstream activations must be multi-plied by the corresponding weights, and these contributions are then summed.

Most useful neural networks are too large to be stored within a processor’s internal memory, so weights must be brought in from external memory as each layer of the network is computed, each time subjecting the calculations to the dreaded von Neumann bottleneck. This leads digital compute hardware to favor DNNs that move fewer weights in from memory and then aggressively reuse these weights.

A RADICAL NEW APPROACH to energy -efficient DNN hardware occurred to us at IBM Research back in 2014. Together with other investigators, we had been working on crossbar arrays of non-volatile memory (NVM) devices. Cross-bar arrays are constructs where devices, memory cells for example, are built in the vertical space between two perpendicu-lar sets of horizontal conductors, the so-called bitlines and the wordlines. We realized that, with a few slight adapta-tions, our memory systems would be ideal for DNN computations, particularly those for which existing weight-reuse tricks work poorly. We refer to this opportunity as “analog AI,” although other researchers doing similar work also

use terms like “processing-in-memory” or “compute-in-memory.”

There are several varieties of NVM, and each stores data differently. But data is retrieved from all of them by measur-ing the device’s resistance (or, equiva-lently, its inverse—conductance). Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) uses electron spins, and flash memory uses trapped charge. Resistive RAM (RRAM) devices store data by creating and later disrupting conductive filamentary defects within a tiny metal-insulator -metal device. Phase-change memory (PCM) uses heat to induce rapid and reversible transitions between a high-conductivity crystalline phase and a low-conductivity amorphous phase.

Flash, RRAM, and PCM offer the low- and high-resistance states needed for conventional digital data storage, plus the intermediate resistances needed for analog AI. But only RRAM and PCM can be readily placed in a crossbar array built in the wiring above silicon transistors in high-performance logic, to minimize the distance between memory and logic.

We organize these NVM memory cells in a two-dimensional array, or “tile.” Included on the tile are transistors or other devices that control the reading and writing of the NVM devices. For memory applications, a read voltage addressed to one row (the wordline) cre-ates currents proportional to the NVM’s conductance that can be detected on the

columns (the bitlines) at the edge of the array, retrieving the stored data.

To make such a tile part of a DNN, each row is driven with a voltage for a duration that encodes the activation value of one upstream neuron. Each NVM device along the row encodes one synaptic weight with its conductance. The result-ing read current is effectively performing, through Ohm’s Law (in this case expressed as “current equals voltage times conduc-tance”), the multiplication of excitation and weight. The individual currents on each bitline then add together according to Kirchhoff’s Current Law. The charge generated by those currents is integrated over time on a capacitor, producing the result of the MAC operation.

These same analog in-memory sum-mation techniques can also be performed using flash and even SRAM cells, which can be made to store multiple bits but not analog conductances. But we can’t use Ohm’s Law for the multiplication step. Instead, we use a technique that can accommodate the one- or two-bit dynamic range of these memory devices. However, this technique is highly sensi-tive to noise, so we at IBM have stuck to analog AI based on PCM and RRAM.

Unlike conductances, DNN weights and activations can be either positive or negative. To implement signed weights, we use a pair of current paths—one adding charge to the capacitor, the other subtracting. To implement signed exci-

Insulator

RESISTIVE RAM FLASH MEMORY ELECTROCHEMICAL RAM

Vacancy

Control gateGate/reservoir

Electrolyte

Channel

Floating gate

Phase-change memory’s conductance is set by the transition between a crystalline and an amorphous state in a chalcogenide glass. In resistive RAM, conductance depends on the creation and destruction of conductive filaments in an insulator. Flash memory stores data as charge trapped in a “floating gate.” The presence or

absence of that charge modifies conductances across the device. Electrochemical RAM acts like a miniature battery. Pulses of voltage on a gate electrode modulate the conductance between the other two terminals by the exchange of ions through a solid electrolyte.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  47

tations, we allow each row of devices to swap which of these paths it connects with, as needed.

With each column performing one MAC operation, the tile does an entire vector-matrix multiplication in parallel. For a tile with 1,024 × 1,024 weights, this is 1 million MACs at once.

In systems we’ve designed, we expect that all these calculations can take as little as 32 nanoseconds. Because each MAC performs a computation equivalent to that of two digital operations (one multiply followed by one add), perform-ing these 1 million analog MACs every 32 nanoseconds represents 65 trillion operations per second.

We’ve built tiles that manage this feat using just 36 femtojoules of energy per operation, the equivalent of 28 trillion operations per joule. Our latest tile designs reduce this figure to less than 10 fJ, making them 100 times as efficient as commercially available hardware and 10 times better than the system-level energy efficiency of the latest custom

digital accelerators, even those that aggressively sacrifice precision for energy efficiency.

It’s been important for us to make this per-tile energy efficiency high, because a full system consumes energy on other tasks as well, such as moving activation values and supporting digital circuitry.

THERE ARE SIGNIFICANT challenges to overcome for this analog-AI approach to really take off. First, deep neural net-works, by definition, have multiple layers. To cascade multiple layers, we must pro-cess the VMM tile’s output through an artificial neuron’s activation—a nonlin-ear function—and convey it to the next tile. The nonlinearity could potentially be performed with analog circuits and the results communicated in the duration form needed for the next layer, but most networks require other operations beyond a simple cascade of VMMs. That means we need efficient analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) and modest amounts of parallel digital compute between the

tiles. Novel, high-efficiency ADCs can help keep these circuits from affecting the overall efficiency too much. Recently, we unveiled a high-performance PCM-based tile using a new kind of ADC that helped the tile achieve better than 10 tril-lion operations per watt.

A second challenge, which has to do with the behavior of NVM devices, is more troublesome. Digital DNNs have proven accurate even when their weights are described with fairly low-precision numbers. The 32-bit floating-point num-bers that CPUs often calculate with are overkill for DNNs, which usually work just fine and with less energy when using 8-bit floating-point values or even 4-bit integers. This provides hope for analog computation, so long as we can maintain a similar precision.

Given the importance of conductance precision, writing conductance values to NVM devices to represent weights in an analog neural network needs to be done slowly and carefully. Compared with tra-ditional memories, such as SRAM and

Vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) is the core of a neural network’s computing [left]; it is a collection of multiply-and-accumulate processes. Here the activations of artificial neurons [yellow] are multiplied by the weights of their connections [light blue] to the next layer of neurons [green].

For analog AI, VMM is performed on a crossbar array tile [center]. At each cross point, a nonvolatile memory cell

encodes the weight as conductance. The neurons’ activations are encoded as the duration of a voltage pulse. Ohm’s Law dictates that the current along each crossbar column is equal to this voltage times the conductance. Capacitors [not shown] at the bottom of the tile sum up these currents. A neural network’s multiple layers are represented by converting the output of one tile into the voltage duration pulses needed as the input to the next tile [right].

X1

y1

y2

yj

X2

Xi

Vector-Matrix Multiplication with Analog AI

y1 y2 yj

X1

X2

Xi

48  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

DRAM, PCM and RRAM are already slower to program and wear out after fewer programming cycles. Fortunately, for inference, weights don’t need to be frequently reprogrammed. So analog AI can use time-consuming write- verification techniques to boost the precision of pro-gramming RRAM and PCM devices with-out any concern about wearing the devices out.

That boost is much needed because nonvolatile memories have an inherent level of programming noise. RRAM’s conductivity depends on the movement of just a few atoms to form filaments. PCM’s conductivity depends on the random formation of grains in the poly-crystalline material. In both, this ran-domness poses challenges for writing, verifying, and reading values. Further, in most NVMs, conductances change with temperature and with time, as the amor-phous phase structure in a PCM device drifts, or the filament in an RRAM relaxes, or the trapped charge in a flash memory cell leaks away.

There are some ways to finesse this problem. Significant improvements in weight programming can be obtained by using two conductance pairs. Here, one pair holds most of the signal, while the other pair is used to correct for program-ming errors on the main pair. Noise is reduced because it gets averaged out across more devices.

We tested this approach recently in a multitile PCM-based chip, using both one and two conductance pairs per weight. With it, we demonstrated excel-lent accuracy on several DNNs, even on a recurrent neural network, a type that’s typically sensitive to weight program-ming errors.

Different techniques can help amelio-rate noise in reading and drift effects. But because drift is predictable, perhaps the simplest is to amplify the signal during a read with a time-dependent gain that can offset much of the error. Another approach is to use the same techniques that have been developed to train DNNs for low-precision digital inference. These adjust the neural-network model to match the noise limitations of the under-lying hardware.

As we mentioned, networks are becoming larger. In a digital system, if the network doesn’t fit on your accelerator, you bring in the weights for each layer of the DNN from external memory chips.

But NVM’s writing limitations make that a poor decision. Instead, multiple analog AI chips should be ganged together, with each passing the intermediate results of a partial network from one chip to the next. This scheme incurs some addi-tional communication latency and energy, but it’s far less of a penalty than moving the weights themselves.

UNTIL NOW, we’ve only been talking about inference—where an already-trained neural network acts on novel data. But there are also opportunities for analog AI to help train DNNs.

DNNs are trained using the back-propagation algorithm. This combines the usual forward inference operation with two other important steps—error backpropagation and weight update. Error backpropagation is like running inference in reverse, moving from the last layer of the network back to the first layer; weight update then combines informa-tion from the original forward inference run with these backpropagated errors to adjust the network weights in a way that makes the model more accurate.

The backpropagation step can be done in place on the tiles but in the oppo-site manner of inferencing—applying voltages to the columns and integrating current along rows. Weight update is then performed by driving the rows with the original activation data from the for-ward inference, while driving the col-umns with the error signals produced during backpropagation.

Training involves numerous small weight increases and decreases that must cancel out properly. That’s difficult for two reasons. First, recall that NVM devices wear out with too much programming. Second, the same voltage pulse applied with opposite polarity to an NVM may not change the cell’s conductance by the same amount; its response is asymmetric. But symmetric behavior is critical for backpropagation to produce accurate networks. This is only made more chal-lenging because the magnitude of the conductance changes needed for training approaches the level of inherent random-ness of the materials in the NVMs.

There are several approaches that can help here. For example, there are various ways to aggregate weight updates across multiple training examples, and then transfer these updates onto NVM devices periodically during training. A novel algo-

rithm we developed at IBM, called Tiki-Taka, uses such techniques to train DNNs successfully even with highly asymmetric RRAM devices. Finally, we are developing a device called electro-chemical random-access memory (ECRAM) that can offer not just symmet-ric but highly linear and gradual conduc-tance updates.

THE SUCCESS OF analog AI will depend on achieving high density, high through-put, low latency, and high energy effi-ciency—simultaneously. Density depends on how tightly the NVMs can be integrated into the wiring above a chip’s transistors. Energy efficiency at the level of the tiles will be limited by the circuitry used for analog-to-digital conversion.

But even as these factors improve and as more and more tiles are linked together, Amdahl’s Law—an argument about the limits of parallel computing—will pose new challenges to optimizing system energy efficiency. Previously unimportant aspects such as data com-munication and the residual digital com-puting needed between tiles will incur more and more of the energy budget, leading to a gap between the peak energy efficiency of the tile itself and the sus-tained energy efficiency of the overall analog-AI system. Of course, that’s a problem that eventually arises for every AI accelerator, analog or digital.

The path forward is necessarily differ-ent from digital AI accelerators. Digital approaches can bring precision down until accuracy falters. But analog AI must first increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the internal analog modules until it is high enough to demonstrate accuracy equivalent to that of digital systems. Any subsequent SNR improvements can then be applied toward increasing density and energy efficiency.

These are exciting problems to solve, and it will take the coordinated efforts of materials scientists, device experts, cir-cuit designers, system architects, and DNN experts working together to solve them. There is a strong and continued need for more energy-efficient AI accel-eration, and a shortage of other attractive alternatives for delivering on this need. Given the wide variety of potential memory devices and implementation paths, it is quite likely that some degree of analog computation will find its way into future AI accelerators. n

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  49

A team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and other institutions experimented with these 1-ampere-hour and 10-Ah battery cells containing recycled cathode materials.

NEWS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

BATTERIES

Battery Recycling Really Works Repurposed cathodes can be even better than shiny new onesBY PRACHI PATEL

L ithium-ion batteries, with their  use of riskily mined metals, tarnish the green image of electric vehicles. Recycling to

recover those valuable metals would minimize the social and environmental impact of mining, keep millions of tons of batteries from landfills, and cut the energy use and emissions created from making batteries.

But while the EV battery-recy-cling industry is starting to take off, getting carmakers to use recy-cled materials remains a hard sell. “In general, people’s impression is that recycled material is not as good as virgin material,” says Yan Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at Worcester Poly-technic Institute, in Massachu-setts. “Battery companies still hesitate to use recycled material in their batteries.”

A new study by Wang and a team that includes researchers from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), Chinese battery company A123 Systems, and others shows that battery and car manufacturers needn’t worry. The results, published in the journal Joule, show that batteries with recycled cathodes can be as good as, or even better than those using newly unearthed materials.

The team tested batteries with recy-cled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode, which contain a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a pat-ented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a Massachusetts startup Wang cofounded, is now commercializing.

either burning them using lots of energy or grinding them up and dissolving them in acids. Most large recycling companies, which have mainly been recycling con-sumer-electronics batteries, and upcom-ing battery-recycling startups use these methods to produce separate elements to sell to battery-material companies that will in turn make the high-grade materi-als for car and battery makers.

But the real value of an EV battery is in the cathode, Wang points out. Cathode materials are proprietary combinations of metals including nickel, manganese, and cobalt that are crafted into particles with specific sizes and structures.

Battery Resourcers’ recycling tech-nology produces various ready-to-use NMC cathode materials based on what a car company wants. That means selling the recycled materials could turn a profit, something recycling companies say can be hard to do. “We are the only company that gives an output that is a cathode material,” he says. “Other companies [sell] elements,

so their value added is less.”Its technology involves

shredding batteries and remov-ing the steel cases, aluminum and copper wires, plastics, and pouch materials for recycling. The remaining black mass is dissolved in solvents, and the graphite, carbon, and impuri-ties are filtered out or chemically separated. Using a patented chemical technique, the nickel, manganese, and cobalt are then mixed in desired ratios to make cathode powders.

A few other researchers and outfits such as the ReCell Center, a battery- recycling research collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, are also developing direct recycling technology. But they likely will

not be producing high volumes of recy-cled cathode material any time soon.

Battery Resourcers, meanwhile, is already selling its recycled materials to battery manufacturers on a small scale. The company plans to open its first com-mercial plant in the United States, which will be able to process more than 9,000 tonnes of batteries, in 2022. In Septem-ber, it raised US $70 million, with which it plans to launch two more facilities, in Europe, by the end of 2022. n

The recycled material had a more porous microscopic structure that is better for lithium ions to slip in and out of. The result: batteries with an energy density similar to those made with com-mercial cathodes, but that also lasted 53 percent longer.

While the recycled batteries weren’t tested in cars, they were tested at industri-

ally relevant scales. The researchers made 11-ampere-hour industry-standard pouch cells loaded with materials at the same density as EV batteries. Engineers at A123 Systems did most of the testing, Wang says, using a protocol devised by the USABC to meet commercial viability goals for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He says the results prove that recycled cathode materials are a viable alternative to pristine materials.

EV batteries are complex beasts and recycling them isn’t easy. It involves

50  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

NEWS OF THE IEEE  VOLUME 45 / ISSUE 4

Saifur Rahman Is 2022 IEEE President-Elect P. 56

3D-Printed Microscope Speeds COVID Diagnosis P. 61

Broadcom’s Henry Samueli on Why He Gives P. 54

DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  51Photo-illustration by Max-o-matic

IEE

E.T

V

52  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

PRESIDENT'S COLUMN

IEEE’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion IEEE’S MISSION to foster technological innovation and excellence to benefit humanity requires the talents and perspectives of people with different personal, cultural, and technical back-grounds. In support of this mission—and to aid our members and volunteers—it is vital that members have a safe and inclu-sive place for collegial discourse and that all feel included and that they belong.

IEEE reinforced its support for diver-sity and inclusion in 2019 when the IEEE Board of Directors adopted the follow-ing: “IEEE is committed to advancing diversity in the technical profession, and to promoting an inclusive and equitable culture that welcomes, engages, and rewards all who contribute to the field, without regard to race, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Last year the three presidents of IEEE emphasized that commit-ment with the following: “IEEE is, and remains, strongly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we see no place for hatred and discrimi-nation in our communities.”

Both statements reflect IEEE’s longstanding commitment to engage diverse perspectives for the better-ment of the engineering profession and ensure a welcoming environment that equitably engages, supports, and recognizes the diverse individuals dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

I think it was very important for the organization to make these public statements, as it shows that IEEE believes that embracing diversity and inclusion as organizational values is a way to intentionally increase its

ability to listen to, and empower, all stakeholders.

Supporting diversityIEEE has supported diversity and inclusion for many years through numerous efforts and programs. A number of committees within IEEE have been doing important work in these areas over the past few years. Along with many other dedicated volunteers, 2019 IEEE President José M.F. Moura and Andrea Goldsmith, chair of the IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Profes-sional Ethics since its inception in 2019, were key leaders.

Building on this momentum, a new website launched this year contains a wealth of information, resources, and tools for members, volunteers, and the broader community. The site highlights ongoing efforts by various IEEE groups that are taking action to foster a diverse, equitable, and welcoming envi-ronment. I truly hope this website can help raise awareness of the importance of diversity and inclusion in creating technology to benefit humanity.

Another important step in IEEE’s collective journey toward an inclusive and equitable culture includes recent revisions to the IEEE Publications Services and Products Operations Manual [page 60]. The revisions permit authors to change their preferred name—whether it be due to marriage or divorce, religious conversion, or gender alignment. IEEE will modify the metadata associated with their IEEE publications upon successful validation of the identity of the requesting author.

Given our mission, IEEE collabo-rates globally with all our stakeholders and must seek to maintain an open and inclusive platform for our authors. These revisions recognize the impor-tance that authors place on managing their own name and identity.

The importance of codesAn organization’s ethics speak to how it supports diversity and inclusion. I am proud to say that IEEE is ahead of many professional societies in having a code of ethics and a code of conduct, both of which were revised last year.

DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  53

EDITOR’S NOTE

These reviews and revisions were necessary because our policies had not been reexamined in many years. The updates incorporate high-level prin-ciples such as a commitment not to engage in harassment, and protecting the privacy of others. These changes reflect IEEE’s longstanding commit-ment to ensuring the engineering profession maximizes its impact and success by welcoming, engaging, and rewarding all those who contribute to the field in an equitable manner.

Reporting mechanismsIn addition, as part of IEEE’s commit-ment to meeting the highest standards of integrity, responsibility, and ethical behavior, the IEEE Board of Directors adopted a set of changes to the IEEE Bylaws and Policies to strengthen our Ethics and Member Conduct processes around reporting, mediation, adjudica-tion, appealing, and sanctioning ethical misconduct. The new ethics reporting processes went into effect on 1 April.

The primary goals of the changes are to simplify the process for filing reports of misconduct, to increase the transparency of how IEEE handles complaints, and to expand the accessibility of the process and make it more inclusive. The time frame to report professional ethics violations has been increased from two years to five years from the date of the incident. These improvements reinforce the value IEEE places on holding our members and stake-holders to the highest ethical standards.

I am extremely proud of the good work that we have been accomplishing across IEEE to ensure that our environ-ments are safe and that our members have collaborative and collegial places that promote the best technical discus-sions, where all voices are heard.

I urge all IEEE’s entities to continue to work together to meet the growing expectations of members and other stakeholders for an inclusive and equita-ble culture that welcomes, engages, and rewards all who contribute to the field.

— SUSAN K. “KATHY” LAND IEEE president and CEO

Thank you for your continued support. Please share your thoughts with me at president@ieee.org.

Rising From Humble BeginningsAn engineering degree can be a ticket to success

THIS ISSUE FEATURES members who had modest upbringings and went on to do great things.

As a teenager, Henry Samueli [page 54] stocked shelves and operated the cash register at his parents’ liquor/grocery store. He had no idea what an electrical engineer was until a teacher in middle school predicted he would become one after he built an AM/FM shortwave radio from an electronics kit.

The IEEE Fellow went on to help found Broadcom, a prominent producer of chips used in communications and networking equipment. A well-known philanthro-pist, Samueli has pledged to give away the majority of his wealth to programs that support STEM education, integrative health, youth services, and social justice.

Senior Member Thy Tran fled Vietnam in 1979 with her family. On page 58, she talks about her harrowing journey to the United States—which included a stay at a refugee camp in Thailand. Her career as an engineer lifted her family out of poverty. Tran is now vice president of DRAM process integra-tion at Micron.

On page 62, learn about the Folsom Powerhouse in California, the birth-place of the AC grid. Now an IEEE Milestone, it was the first facility to send high-voltage alternating current over long-distance transmission lines.

To help reduce the time it takes to diagnose the

novel coronavirus in areas that lack health care facil-ities, IEEE Fellow Bahram Javidi [page 61] developed an inexpensive 3D-printed microscope. Using holo graphy and deep-learning technology, the microscope can detect COVID-19 in a drop of blood in a matter of minutes.

Another diagnostic tool that uses AI is revolution-izing cancer diagnosis. On page 65, learn how startup Paige uses machine learning to help pathologists make faster, more accurate diag-noses of prostate and breast cancer from tissue-sample images. Its chief executive is IEEE Member Leo Grady.

Are you an IEEE member who has founded a startup and is looking for financial support? The new Powered by IEEE program on page 64 can provide you with discounts on subscriptions to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and the IEEE Data-Port dataset platform.

Also in this issue, on page 60, check out the new IEEE Teaching Excel-lence Hub, a resource for university-level educators who teach engineering, computer science, and technology.

Congratulations to IEEE Life Fellow Saifur Rahman, the 2022 IEEE president-elect [page 56].

—KATHY PRETZEditor in chief, The Institute

For updates about IEEE and its members, visit us at spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute

PROFILE

Why Broadcom’s Henry Samueli Is Giving Away BillionsHe and his wife’s pet causes include STEM education and health care BY KATHY PRETZ

DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  55

THE LACK OF an engineering role model while he was growing up didn’t hinder Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli from having a storied engi-neering career. Samueli founded the company in 1991 with one of his Ph.D. students, Henry T. Nicholas, while he was an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The two conceived digital signal processing architectures for broad-band communications chips and designed the world’s first chips for digital interactive television. After forming Broadcom, they built the world’s first digital cable set-top-box modem chipset, which served as the cable signal receiver for the digital box, according to a 1999 profile of Samueli in IEEE Spectrum.

Today Broadcom is one of the largest producers of chips used in communica-tions and networking equipment. Based in San Jose, Calif., the company merged with Avago Technologies in 2016. Samu-eli serves as chairman of the board.

Samueli is also a well-known philanthropist. Forbes estimates his worth to be more than US $6 billion, and he and his wife, Susan [left], are members of the Giving Pledge. The group consists of many of the world’s leading philanthropists, who prom-ise to give away the majority of their money during their lifetime.

The couple are doing that through the Samueli Foundation, which supports science, technology, engi-neering, and math education; integra-tive health; youth services; and social justice programs, mostly in California.

“It is important for philanthropists to find a focus for their giving,” Samueli says. “If you gave a dollar to every person in the world, you would have given away $7 billion and accomplished very little. Or you can focus and give much larger gifts to a few programs that will have a huge impact.”

The IEEE Fellow has received many honors, including this year’s IEEE Founders Medal for “leadership in research, development, and commercial-ization of broadband communication and networking technology with global impact.” The medal is sponsored by the IEEE Richard and Mary Jo Stanley Memorial Fund of the IEEE Foundation.

“I’m very humbled,” Samueli says. “It’s an incredible honor for me to be included in this remarkable group of individuals.”

Worthwhile causesSamueli has been generous to his alma mater, UCLA, among other insti-tutions. He became an EE professor at the university in 1985. He took a leave of absence in 1995 to be at Broadcom full time.

UCLA’s engineering school in 2000 was named for him after he donated $30 million. In 2019 the Samueli Foun-dation donated $100 million more, the school’s largest gift ever.

Samueli doesn’t give anony-mously. He and his wife believe it is important to have their philanthropy be visible because, he says, “We want to set an example and motivate others to get involved in philan-thropy and be proud to show it.”

Another university that has benefited from his generosity is the University of California, Irvine. In 2017 the Samueli Foun-dation donated $200 million, the largest gift in the university’s history. The Samu-elis also provided $30 million to help fund the construction of the newly opened interdisciplinary science and engineering building.

Another program close to Samu-eli’s heart is the Samueli Academy, in Santa Ana, an underserved community in Orange County, Calif. The public charter school is for middle school and high school students, some of whom live in foster-care homes. Samueli says the school uses a project-based learning approach, whereby students collaborate to solve complex problems using critical thinking.

“Many are pursuing STEM careers,” he proudly says of the school’s alumni. “It’s all because of this hands-on project-based learning curriculum.”

Samueli himself came from a humble background. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who

emigrated after surviving the Holo-caust. He grew up in Los Angeles and as a teenager worked in his parents’ liquor/grocery store, where he stocked shelves, operated the cash register, and helped out with the bookkeeping.

A hands-on project inspired him to become an engineer, he says. In a seventh-grade shop class at Bancroft Middle School, in Los Angeles, he built an AM/FM shortwave radio using a Heathkit DIY electronics kit.

Leadership skillsSamueli says he and Nicholas divided the responsibilities of Broadcom early on. Samueli was the CTO, and Nicholas took on the role of CEO. They hired seasoned professionals to

do jobs they themselves had no experience in, such as finance, human resources, and marketing.

“In the early days of a startup, having common sense and good judgment carries you a long way,” Samueli says. “The most important thing is developing good technology and build-ing a customer base. It isn’t until you become more mature and start

growing your revenues that you need to think more about how to properly structure the organization and add general and administrative functions.”

An essential serviceSamueli joined IEEE when he was a UCLA undergraduate, he says, because he wanted to have access to research of faculty and students from around the world.

“The only way to get that access was to subscribe to IEEE journals,” he says. “Plus, IEEE gave tremen-dous discounts to students, so it cost almost nothing. The subscription was critical in the early days of my research program.”

Samueli made sure Broadcom had a subscription to the entire IEEE Xplore Digital Library because he says, “As an R&D engineer you can’t survive with-out access to the IEEE library.”

EmployerBroadcomTitleChairman of the boardMember gradeFellow Alma mater University of California, Los Angeles

Photo-illustration by Max-o-matic

56  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

IEEE NEWS

Saifur Rahman Is 2022 IEEE President-Elect BY JOANNA GOODRICH

IEEE LIFE FELLOW Saifur Rahman has been elected as the 2022 IEEE president-elect. He is set to begin serv-ing as president on 1 January 2023.

Rahman, who was nominated by petition, received 13,296 votes in the election. Fellow S.K. Ramesh received 13,013 votes, Life Fellow Thomas M. Coughlin received 11,802 votes, and Life Senior Member Francis B. Grosz received 6,308.

At press time, the results were unof-ficial. The IEEE Board of Directors was scheduled to accept the IEEE Tellers Committee report last month.

Rahman is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute at the university, which helps faculty members get access to research funding, government laboratories, and industry research centers.

Rahman is also the founder of BEM Controls in McLean, Va., a software

company that provides buildings with energy efficiency solutions.

He served as chair of the U.S. National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for International Science and Engineering from 2010 to 2013.

Rahman is the founding editor in chief of IEEE Electrification Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy.

He served as the 2018–2019 president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. While president, Rahman established the IEEE PES corporate engagement program, which allows employers to receive IEEE benefits by paying their employees’ IEEE membership dues.

Rahman set up IEEE PES chapters’ councils in Africa, China, India, and Latin America. The councils have empow-ered local leaders to initiate their own programs. He also led the effort to estab-lish PES University, which offers courses, tutorials, and webinars to IEEE members.

Rahman was the 2006 chair of the IEEE Publication Services and Prod-ucts Board and a member of the IEEE Board of Directors.

As an IEEE PES distinguished lecturer, he has spoken in more than 30 countries on the smart grid, energy-efficient buildings, sensor inte-gration, and other topics.

Rahman has received several IEEE recognitions including the 2000 IEEE Millennium Medal for outstanding achievements and contributions to IEEE, the 2011 IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award, the 2012 IEEE PES Merito-rious Service Award, and the 2013 IEEE PES Outstanding Power Engi-neering Educator Award.

To find out who was chosen as IEEE-USA president-elect, IEEE Standards Association president-elect, and more, read the full results on the election website (www.ieee.org/election).

Membership by the NumbersHere are some takeaways from the recently released 2020 IEEE Annual Report.

Largest societies

1. IEEE Computer Society

2. IEEE Power & Energy Society

3. IEEE Communications Society

4. IEEE Signal Processing Society

5. IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

Countries with the most student members1. India:

29,244

2. United States: 20,756

3. China: 12,243

4. Canada: 3,138

5. Tunisia: 2,915

Countries with the most members1. United States:

160,298

2. India: 45,353

3. China: 30,106

4. Canada: 15,106

5. Japan: 13,798

SOURCE: IEEE ANNUAL REPORT

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58  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

Employer Micron Title Vice president of DRAM process integration Member grade Senior member Alma mater University of Washington in Seattle

PROFILE

From Refugee to Micron VP Thank Thy Tran for the 1-alpha node DRAMBY JOANNA GOODRICH

THY TRAN had a harrowing journey to the United States. Tran, now vice pres-ident of DRAM process integration at Micron in Boise, Idaho, fled Vietnam with her family in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon.

“I remember sneaking out in the middle of the night on our third attempt,” Tran recalls. “My mother had to give my two younger brothers sleeping pills so that they would not cry in the middle of the night, for fear that we would get caught and be shot or be sent to prison.”

They lived at a refugee camp in Thailand for a year before immigrating to the United States.

The IEEE senior member calls electrical engineering her lucky ticket because it lifted her and her family out of poverty.

Engineering “became a passion, and still is,” she says. “I’m more excited to go to work today than the first day of my job right after graduating college.”

Tran is an expert in process integration for DRAM—dynamic random-access memory—technology. She led the Micron team that built DRAM using 1-alpha process tech-nology. In January the company announced it had begun commercial production of chips built using the 1α technology. The process improves memory density by 40 percent over the company’s previous offering and

Photo-illustration by Max-o-matic

DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  59

“My guiding principle has always been not how much money I make, or the accolades that you get in life, but to live a full life.”

saves mobile devices 15 percent more power, according to Tran.

Escape from VietnamAfter the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese, Tran’s father, who was part of the South Vietnamese military, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Her mother, fearing for the family’s safety, decided to leave the country.

It took three attempts for Tran, her mother, and her brothers to success-fully leave Vietnam. Like thousands of other Vietnamese people fleeing the war, the family boarded a boat.

After surviving attacks by Thai pirates as well as dangerous thunder-storms, they reached Thailand. They lived in a refugee camp in the city of Songkhla for a year. With help from an aunt who lived in the United States, the family secured entry to the country.

Tran aspired to be an artist, but her family couldn’t afford to pay for tuition. She decided to study engineer-ing instead because she was able to get a full scholarship.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in EE from the University of Wash-ington in Seattle and in 1993 joined Motorola in Austin, Texas. She worked on process technology for microprocessors and static RAM at Motorola’s MOS 11 factory.

After three and a half years there, though, she decided she wanted to pursue a position that enabled her to travel and learn about other cultures.

“My guiding principle has always been not how much money I make, or the accolades that you get in life, but to live a full life,” she says.

She joined Siemens’ international transfer management team in 1996, in East Fishkill, N.Y. The team was tasked with leading a 200mm factory startup for ProMOS Technologies in Taiwan, a joint venture between Siemens and integrated circuit manu-facturer Mosel Vitelic, which was based in California.

The startup gave her “a taste of the excitement and the adrenaline rush of starting something new and applying my experience to new situa-tions,” Tran says.

In 1997 she and her first manager at Motorola founded semiconductor

manufacturer WaferTech. The Camas, Wash., company was the first fabri-cation plant in the United States that exclusively manufactured semicon-ductors. It was created by ADI, Altera, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufactur-ing, and Integrated Silicon Solution.

Tran left after two years and joined Infineon in Richmond, Va., as a princi-pal engineer. In 2004 she was relocated to the company’s research facility in Dresden, Germany, to help develop new DRAM technology.

She moved back to the United States in 2008 and began working at Micron as the senior process integra-tion engineer. She rose through the ranks as a technical leader for multiple DRAM programs and was promoted in 2019 to vice president of DRAM process integration.

“Before joining Micron, I had always admired how Micron was at the forefront of DRAM development and cost-effective technologies,” she says.

Developing the 1-alpha node DRAMTran’s mission is to build Micron’s next generation of DRAM technology. Her team collaborated with Micron’s design and product engineering crews to take a holistic approach when developing the process, she says. They didn’t focus only on the design and engineering behind it; they also took into consideration manufacturing costs.

Making chips denser and smaller allows manufacturers to pack more transistors and capacitors onto a wafer—which helps to increase the number of bits and reduce costs. Today’s state-of-the-art DRAM chips have a half-pitch—half the distance between cells—of 10 to

19 nanometers. As the half-pitch has decreased in that range, the manufac-turing process has progressed through a series of names: 1x to 1y to 1z.

Micron makes the 1α DRAM node by using multipatterning processes and advanced photolithography, whereby light is used to transfer a pattern from an optical mask onto a wafer.

Because the 1α DRAM chip is smaller and more efficient, Tran says, it can be used for artificial intelligence applications and 5G technology. AI systems need massive storage and computing resources, she says, and the 1α DRAM is up to the challenge.

Thanks to the chip, she says, 5G technology users can perform more tasks on their smartphone without losing as much battery life. The DRAM chip also can be used in computers, data centers, and server farms.

“The team went all out with respect to cutting-edge process and tooling capability,” Tran says. “We took more risks but also were very maniacal about defining what mitigations are needed to beat those risks.”

IEEE is integralTran, who joined IEEE more than 11 years ago, says she has the utmost regard for the organization. She has attended and presented at IEEE conferences, and if she cannot attend a conference, she sends a member of her team.

Tran says the IEEE Xplore Digi-tal Library is her go-to resource for journals.

“As a member, I try to encour-age others to join and to be active,” she says. “I have team members and colleagues who peer-review papers to give back to the organization.”

60  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

IEEE NEWS

It’s Now Easier for IEEE Authors to Change Their Preferred NameBY IEEE

IN JUNE, IEEE’s Board of Direc-tors took an important step in its collective journey toward an inclusive and equitable culture that welcomes, engages, and rewards all who contribute to the field, with-out regard to race, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

To fully align IEEE’s actions with our commitment to diversity and inclusion, IEEE’s Publication Services

and Products Board (PSPB) and the IEEE Board of Directors voted to permit authors who change their preferred name—due to marriage or divorce, religious conversion, gender alignment, or any other reason—to modify the metadata associated with their IEEE publications upon success-ful validation of the identity of the requesting author.

“IEEE continues its strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work and across

our professions. Given our mission, focused on the advancement of tech-nology for the benefit of humanity, IEEE collaborates globally with all our stakeholders and seeks to maintain an open and inclusive platform for our authors,” says Susan K. (Kathy) Land, 2021 IEEE president and CEO.

“I’m pleased with the IEEE Board of Directors’s unanimous approval of a policy that recognizes the importance that authors place on managing their own name and identity.”

Larry Hall, vice president, IEEE Publication Services and Products, replied, “I’m quite pleased that the Board was able to make substantial progress in addressing the needs of our author community in concert with progressive industry practice. We will continue to work on issues related to removing impediments and expanding access for all researchers who have something to contribute to the schol-arly conversation.”

BEST PRACTICES The Engineering Education 2.0 interactive virtual-event series equips engineering educators with best practices on topics such as:

• Transformation in Practice: Approaches to Innovative Instructional Design.

• Interviews in the Field.

• Digital Transformation of Teaching in a Post-Pandemic World.

DISTANCE LEARNING SERIES The webinars in this series cover technologies to facilitate student-teacher communication. They include:

• Online Delivery of Engineering Programs: Tips You Can Use From an Experienced ABET-Accredited Program.

• Helping Students Learn via Online Delivery: Considerations for Pandemic Pedagogy.

IEEE ACCREDITATION SERIES This series presents behind-the-scenes experiences from IEEE/ABET program evaluators and global accreditation experts. The first event, How an IEEE Program Evaluator Prepares for a University Visit, is available on demand.

TEACHING REMOTELYThe Effective Remote Instruction virtual conference brought together faculty members to share real-world examples and best practices. These five webcasts from the conference are available:

• Ditching the Traditional College Lecture in Remote Instruction.

• Making Labs Effective With Remote Learning.

• Managing Remote Student Teams.

• Student Assessments for Remote Delivery.

• Student and Data Privacy When Offering Remote Instruction.

Johanna Perez is a digital marketing specialist for IEEE Educational Activities.

IEEE PRODUCTS

New Resource Helps University Educators Adapt to Today’s Learning EnvironmentBY JOHANNA PEREZ

The IEEE Teaching Excellence Hub is a resource for university-level educators who are teaching engineering, computer science, and technology courses online or in person. The website offers tools they can use to improve their curriculum, manage student teams, and more. The hub is a collaboration between the IEEE Education Society and the IEEE Educational Activities Board.

Registration is free for all events. Attendees can earn a digital certificate of participation and continuing-education units and professional development hour credits.

Here is an overview of the on-demand events the hub offers.

DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  61

COVID-19 PROJECT

3D-Printed Microscope Spots Coronavirus in Blood Using deep learning, a diagnosis can be made in a matter of minutes

BY KATHY PRETZ

A DIGITAL MICROSCOPE that uses holography and deep-learning technol-ogy could detect COVID-19 in a drop of blood. A diagnosis could be made on the spot in a matter of minutes instead of the hours or sometimes days it can take for PCR test results to come back.

The system, which uses digital holographic microscopy, could be used in areas that lack health care facilities, as well as in hospitals whose labs are backlogged with tests.

That’s according to one of the machine’s developers, IEEE Fellow Bahram Javidi. He is the director of the Multidimensional Optical Sensing and Imaging Systems Lab at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

The preliminary findings, “Digital Holographic Deep Learning of Red Blood

Cells for Field-Portable, Rapid COVID-19 Screening,” were published in the Optical Society’s Optics Letters.

The project stemmed from Javidi's desire to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in countries that have limited resources.

“I wanted to find a way to quickly test for the virus from a droplet of blood using an affordable, portable, and rapid disease-identification system,” he says.

The machine uses low-cost compo-nents that can be easily obtained, includ-ing a camera, a laser diode, an objective lens, a glass plate, and a CMOS image sensor. The body of the microscope can be made using a 3-D printer.

Testing a theoryA number of diseases can modify a person’s red blood cells. Javidi, who is

not a physician, wondered whether the same could be true of COVID-19.

“The signatures would be very small—at the nanoscale level—but the changes in the red blood cells would still be there,” he says.

Javidi’s research team decided to explore digital holographic microscopy, which is used in cell imaging, cell classi-fication, and disease identification.

“DHM has drawn great inter-est due to its stain-free operation, numerical refocusing ability, and single-shot operation, lending itself as a powerful tool for biological sample investigation,” the research-ers wrote in their paper. “The technology has good vertical reso-lution—which helps researchers get a better sense of the morphology of cells. And because it relies on computers for much of the image processing, it is easy to use.”

The technology has been able to identify malaria, diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, and other diseases through blood samples.

In the team’s holographic micro-scope, light from the laser diode passes through the blood sample and is then magnified by an objective lens. Part of the light then bounces off the front of a glass plate and part off the back, creating two copies of the light that have passed through the sample. That creates a hologram that is then recorded by an image sensor. A tech-nician is able to computationally work with the hologram to reconstruct a 3D profile of the sample.

Individual cells are numerically reconstructed to retrieve the cells’ phase profile due to the propaga-tion and interaction of light through the cells, and then inputted into the deep-learning network to be classified.

Because no one feature of the cells was indicative of infection, the team measured a number of different features and fed them into the network to be classified.

Javidi’s team worked with doctors at the university’s health center to obtain the blood samples. He says the next step is to continue to test blood samples of COVID-19 patients including from people outside the United States. He is looking for collaborators.

The digital microscope is composed of a laser diode, a microscope objective lens, a glass plate to induce lateral shearing of the object wavefront, and an image sensor.

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62  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

TECH HISTORY

The Birthplace of the AC GridFolsom Powerhouse was the first to transmit power over long distanceBY JOANNA GOODRICH

BACK IN THE 1800s, electricity distri-bution was a short-range business, driven by nearby DC generators. That changed in 1895. On 13 July of that year, the Folsom Powerhouse, in Califor-nia, became the first facility to send high-voltage alternating current over long-distance transmission lines. It brought electricity to Sacramento over a 35-kilometer-long distribution line using newly invented AC generators and hydroelectric power.

The facility generated three-phase 60 Hz AC electricity—the standard in the United States today—and powered Sacramento businesses such as Buffalo Brewing, as well as the California State Capitol building and the city’s streetcars.

On the 126th anniversary of the achievement, 13 July, the Folsom Power-house was commemorated with an IEEE Milestone. The IEEE Sacramento Valley Section sponsored the nomination.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Stepping into industryHoratio Gates Livermore moved from Maine to California in 1850 during the Gold Rush in pursuit of riches, according

On 13 July 1895, the Folsom Powerhouse successfully transmitted high voltage alternating current to Sacramento, Calif., from its two newly invented AC generators. Now an IEEE Milestone, the facility is a state historic park. W

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DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  63

to a walking tour of Folsom and the facility, which is now a state historic park. After 12 years of mining gold, however, Livermore became more inter-ested in building a logging business and sawmill. He sought to use water wheels powered by the 48-km-long American River to operate sawmills and other industrial plants in the Folsom area. The river runs from the Sierra Nevada moun-tains to downtown Sacramento, where it connects to the Sacramento River.

In 1862, he and his sons, Horatio Putnam and Charles Edward, bought Natoma Water and Mining, in Sacra-mento, to turn the dream into reality. The company owned a network of dams, ditches, and reservoirs that supplied water to the numerous gold mines located around the American River, according to the facility’s website.

In the mid-1860s, the company started construction on a dam in the town of Folsom to provide a pond that would store the logs cut in the higher foothills before they were sent down the river to the sawmill.

The company faced several chal-lenges, however, including finding affordable labor—which delayed construction for many years. After Livermore died in 1892, his sons were able to complete the project by hiring inmates at the San Quentin prison.

The brothers saw a business opportunity larger than just generating power for the sawmills. Instead, they set their sights on providing power to Sacramento with the help of a new technology: hydroelectric power. Folsom is 37 km from Sacramento.

Let there be electricityAlthough the two brothers didn’t build the first electric power plant in the world, it was the largest one at the time and the first to use AC generators.

The Folsom Powerhouse’s main building contained four 750-kilowatt generators that were each 2.6 meters tall and weighed more than 25 metric tons. The generators—manufactured by General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.—were the “largest three-phase dynamos yet constructed,” accord-ing to an 1895 report in The Elec-trical Journal. A 2,896-meter-long

canal parallel to the American River, completed in 1893, provided water power to the generators through four dual turbines invented by John B. McCormick. Each pair of genera-tors produced 1,260 horsepower. The turbines were powered by river water that flowed through four 2.4-meter penstocks—channels to regulate the flow that had gates that could be closed to turn off the water.

The generators’ voltage output was increased from 800 volts to 11,000 by recently invented Stanley transformers. The high voltage allowed the electricity to be sent on a system developed by Louis Bell, chief engineer of the power transmission department at GE. If the AC generators failed, the facility had two small DC generators as backups.

Horatio, Charles, and Albert Galla-tin, a partner in Huntington, Hopkins Hardware, formed the Folsom Water Power Co. It supplied water to Sacra-mento Electric Power and Light, which the three men founded in 1892.

On 13 July 1895, with two gener-ators in operation, electricity was successfully transmitted over 35 km of uninsulated copper wire to Sacramento.

The facility was acquired in 1902 by California Gas and Electric, based in San Francisco, and three years later became part of Pacific Gas and Electric.

The Folsom Powerhouse provided electricity to Sacramento for nearly five decades. In 1952 PG&E donated the powerhouse to California, according to an article about the facility on PG&E’s blog. The original Folsom dam was removed to make way for a larger dam, and the facility was designated a state historic park.

The Milestone plaque is to be displayed at the Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park. The plaque reads:

Folsom was one of the earliest electrical plants to generate three-phase alternating current, and the first using three-phase 60 hertz. On 13 July 1895, General Electric generators began transmitting electricity 22 miles to Sacramento at 11,000 volts, powering businesses, streetcars, and California’s capitol.

The plant demonstrated advantages of three-phase, 60 hertz long-distance transmission, which became standard, and promoted nationwide development of affordable hydropower.

The 750-kilowatt, 2.6-meter-tall AC generators that were used at Folsom Powerhouse were manufactured by General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.

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64  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

IEEE PRODUCTS

IEEE Xplore’s 10 Hottest TopicsBelow are the 10 most popular topics being searched in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library as of press time.

Powered By IEEE Offers Startups Mentoring and SavingsBY KATHY PRETZ

RUNNING A STARTUP isn’t cheap. Many founders bootstrap their company to survive. IEEE is help-ing members who are entrepreneurs save money through its new Powered by IEEE program.

The program, developed by the IEEE Entrepre-neurship Initiative, includes discounts to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and IEEE DataPort. Partic-ipants also receive a US $10,000 credit toward the purchase of software from Freshworks, which provides customer-relationship management tools.

In addition, startups receive free mentor-ing from other entrepreneurs through IEEE’s Founder Office Hours program.

To be eligible for the Powered by IEEE program, an applicant must be an IEEE member who is a CEO, founder, or a senior manager of a startup. Also, the startup must have been launched within the past 10 years and employ a maximum of 50 people.

JOANNE WONGThe IEEE member launched SciosHub last year to improve the data management, performance, and costs of conducting research in life sciences. The company’s flagship product is a software-as-a-service and informatics platform that automates and simplifies the back-end data-management process to enable researchers to focus on data analysis.

AMOGH RAJANNAThis year he founded TFWireless, in Burbank, Calif. The senior member is working to commercialize a physical-layer rateless codec method, which is a forward error correction/channel coding and automatic repeat request technology. It is designed to provide more reliable and less costly transmission of information bits between the transmitter and receiver in a wireless environment.

JOSH ELIJAHThe IEEE member is the founder of BotBlox, in London. It designs and manufactures extremely small networking hardware electronics boards for small drones and mobile robots. Elijah says he works with some of the newest technol-ogies in electronics networking, such as single-pair Ethernet. He claims his startup’s 2G5Blox to be the world’s first 2.5G (2.5GBASE-T) Ethernet switch.

Image processing

Data mining

Antenna

Cloud computing

Artificial intelligence

VLSI

Big dataMachine learning

Deep learning

Internet of things

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Here are three of the entrepreneurs who are participating in the program.

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DECEMBER 2021  THE INSTITUTE  65

STARTUP

AI Diagnostic Tech Is Revolutionizing Cancer DiagnosisPaige’s software analyzes tissue-sample imagesBY PRACHI PATEL

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE was not on Leo Grady’s mind when he was applying for college in the early 1990s. He was interested in human interac-tion, linguistics, and psychology, and he initially chose the unusual double major of anthropology and physics.

But his desire to understand how the human brain works led him to switch from physics to electrical engineering and ultimately to pursue a signal processing degree at the University of Vermont, in Burlington.

“All of this eventually led me to AI,” Grady says. “AI is a mix of psychology, engineering, computer science, and a little bit of philosophy. It really caught my imagination.”

The IEEE member is now the chief executive of Paige, in New York City. The company uses machine learning to help pathologists make faster, more accurate cancer diagnoses from images of tissue samples.

The startup hopes to help doctors catch prostate and breast cancer

A pathologist reviews a digital slide of a biopsy taken from a

prostate-cancer patient on FullFocus, Paige’s digital

pathology viewer.

66  THE INSTITUTE  DECEMBER 2021

earlier, come up with effective treatment plans, and prevent unnec-essary surgeries due to false positives. In May the company announced a partnership with Quest Diagnostics to develop software products that could find markers of cancer that might not have been known before.

“Our technology is truly transfor-mative,” Grady says. “It’s going to help pathologists be more efficient, make higher quality decisions, and get faster results back to patients. It will also ultimately be less expensive for the health care system.”

Paige’s prostate cancer diagnos-tic technology is the first AI product designed for pathology or oncology to earn a U.S. Food and Drug Admin-istration (FDA) Breakthrough Device designation.

Paige is now seeking to use its technology beyond diagnosis. By training its AI to understand the correlations between certain types of tumors and the effectiveness of certain drugs, Grady says, the company hopes to be able to predict treatment regimens for patients.

Having a meaningful impactGrady’s work is a continuation of the ambition he has had since he was a graduate student at Boston University—of making a difference in the world with AI. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the application of neural networks to image analysis. Neural networks are an approach to machine learning, loosely modeled on the human brain, that can be used to iden-tify patterns in data sets. In the early 2000s, neural network research “was on the fringe of AI, the black sheep,” Grady says.

But Grady saw the technology’s potential for the real world. He joined Siemens Corporate Technology, in Princeton, N.J., in 2003 as a research scientist, developing computer vision software for the company’s imaging machines. He focused on medical image analysis, extracting pertinent information from scans of cardiovas-cular and cancer patients that could help with diagnosis.

But despite the success of those AI-based medical analysis instruments in

in-house tests, he “kept hitting roadblock after roadblock” when trying to intro-duce the machines into medical offices.

“They weren’t getting used by doctors,” he says. “They’d say, ‘It doesn’t fit into the hospital’s IT system’ or ‘I can’t get paid for using them’ or ‘I don’t have time to do it.’”

He soon realized that making inroads with AI software would be easier than selling a new hardware system, so he left in 2012 to join medi-cal technology startup HeartFlow, in Redwood City, Calif., as vice president of research and development.

There he led the development of a software-based diagnostic test for coronary heart disease. Starting with a cardiac CT scan, the technology used AI and fluid dynamics to build a 3D model of the heart, calculate blood flow, and help determine if a stent was needed. The approach allows doctors to avoid more-invasive tests, he says.

“It’s better for patients and doctors,” he says, “because it’s lower-cost and lower-risk.”

The technique, which has received clearance from the FDA, is now used by cardiologists in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Great opportunityGrady joined Paige in 2019 because of the opportunity it offered him to

impact the world with AI, he says, with products that could transform cancer care.

Cancer pathology today involves examining tissue samples under a microscope to make diagnoses. But tissues and disease markers can vary widely, so it’s common for pathol-ogists to seek a second opinion or conduct more tests.

Paige’s technology streamlines the process by digitizing it. The company has exclusive rights to tens of thou-sands of already-analyzed pathology slides from Memorial Sloan Kettering and has scanned them into its system to create a database of high-resolution images. The company’s proprietary machine-learning system is trained to detect patterns in the images that correlate with disease prognosis.

When a new tissue scan comes in, the system can classify it based on its training. Rather than phoning a colleague or doing extra testing, a pathologist can use the FullFocus digi-tal pathology viewer to make decisions more quickly and easily, Grady says.

He and his colleagues recently published results showing that Paige’s prostate test reduced diagnostic time by about 65 percent, and it identified prostate cancer in four patients whose cancers were not initially diagnosed by three experienced histopathologists.

“Our technology is truly transformative,” Grady says. “It’s going to help pathologists be more efficient, make higher quality decisions, and get faster results back to patients. It will also ultimately be less expensive for the health care system.”

CULTIVATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF AFRICAN TECHNOLOGY LEADERS

Faculty Positions at CMU-Africa

Join Carnegie Mellon University in Africa to educate the extraordinary master students

in our programs who are becoming the next generation of technology leaders on the continent.

We invite you to be part of a movement for change.

We are looking for top teaching and research faculty at all levels to be based at our beautiful campus in Kigali in the land

of a thousand hills, Rwanda. Kigali in recent years has become an epicenter of tech innovation and provides the perfect setting for a world

class institution to develop tech leaders that create innovative solutions for local and international challenges.

Carnegie Mellon University Africa (CMU-Africa) invites applications for teaching track and research track faculty positions at all levels (i.e., Assistant, Associate and

Full Professor) at its campus in Kigali, Rwanda.

CMU-Africa offers three Master’s degree programs, Information Technology, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering Artificial Intelligence, and has about 25 faculty members dedicated to teaching, research and entrepreneurship activities. CMU-Africa faculty are leading research projects of importance to Africa, e.g., forecasting the economic and mortality impacts of COVID-19 for Rwanda and beyond, enhancing cybersecurity capacity in Africa, and strengthening the teacher management system in Rwanda.

For full Job description and Qualification criteria, Visit http://apply.interfolio.com/96623

CMU is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its community.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) within Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) is searching for an ECE Department Head to provide leadership for the 26 tenured, tenure-track, and instructional faculty, including 3 University Distinguished Professors and a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar, 25 administrative and research staff, 408 undergraduates and 159 graduate students.

This is a full-time, 12-month appointment, 5-year term, tenured full-professor faculty position, reporting directly to the Dean of the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering.

Applications and nominations will be considered until the position is filled; however, applications should be received by full consideration date to ensure full consideration.

Full consideration date: 1/31/2022. The desired start date for this position is July 1, 2022.

To view full posting and apply, visit:

https://jobs.colostate.edu/postings/94402

CSU is an EO/EA/AA employer and conducts

ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

68  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Associate/Assistant Professor in Intelligent Transportation(Ref. No.: IOTSC/AAP/IT/10/2021)

The University of Macau (UM) is the only public comprehensive university in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) located at the west bank of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The GBA is rapidly developing into one of the leading technology and innovation hubs of the world. With a scenic campus of approximately 1 km2 on Hengqin island, UM has achieved significant progress in the past decade as evidenced by its rising international repute, state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities, and the establishment of three State Key Laboratories in microelectronics, Chinese medical sciences, and internet of things for smart city. To support economic diversification of MSAR and deepen collaboration between MSAR and Guangdong Province in Hengqin island, UM will continue to invest in cutting-edge research and develop interdisciplinary programmes in key strategic areas including precision oncology, advanced materials, regional oceanography, artificial intelligence and robotics, data science, cognitive and brain science and economics and finance. Leveraging its ‘4-in-1’ model of education and the largest residential college system in Asia, UM provides all-round undergraduate education, nurturing talent to support social and economic development in MSAR and the GBA as a whole. With unprecedented growth and opportunities for development, UM offers promising career prospects to academics at all levels. It may be noted that English is the working language and the primary medium of instruction at UM.

The State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) invites applications for the position of Associate/Assistant Professor, who will also be a joint faculty member in the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the following disciplines:

• Intelligent Transportation • Big Data Analysis in Urban Transportation• Autonomous Driving • Vehicle to Everything Technology and Applications

State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) - SKL-IOTSCThe State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) is expected to promote smart city development in prospective of IoT, Big Data Technology and Engineering in Macao and inject a fresh impetus to the development of the Greater Bay Area by enhancing research and training in the field and providing technical support plans for improving economic performance, people’s quality of life, and social management. More details about the State Key Laboratory are available from https://skliotsc.um.edu.mo/.

Faculty of Science and Technology - FSTFaculty of Science and Technology aims to provide programmes for undergraduate and graduate education with quality reaching international standard. It strives to become a research active unit advancing the knowledge of engineering and science, and serves the community and industry as an agent of technological innovation and educational advancement. Currently, about 90 faculty members from diverse international backgrounds serve in this faculty. More details about the Faculty of Science and Technology are available from

http://www.fst.um.edu.mo/.

Qualifications1. A PhD degree in Computer Science, Traffic Engineering or related disciplines; 2. A distinguished record of internationally-recognized research and scholarship;3. Demonstrable competence in communication; and4. English is the working language, while knowledge in Chinese/Portuguese will be an advantage.

The selected candidate is expected to assume duty in the 1st quarter of 2022.

RemunerationA taxable annual remuneration starting from MOP828,100 (approximately USD102,230) will be commensurate with the successful applicants’ academic qualification and relevant professional experience. The current local maximum income tax rate is 12% but is effectively around 5% - 7% after various discretionary exemptions. Apart from competitive remuneration, UM offers a wide range of benefits, such as medical insurance, provident fund, on-campus accommodation/housing allowance and other subsidies. Further details on our package are available at: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/learn-more/.

Application ProcedureApplicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details, and apply ONLINE. Review of applications will commence upon receiving applications and continue until the position is filled. Applicants may consider their applications not successful if they are not invited for an interview within 3 months of application.

Human Resources Section, Office of AdministrationUniversity of Macau, Av. da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

Website: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/; Email: vacancy@um.edu.moTel: +853 8822 8577; Fax: +853 8822 2412

The effective position and salary index are subject to the Personnel Statute of the University of Macau in force. The University of Macau reserves the right not to appoint a candidate. Applicants with less qualification and experience can be offered lower positions under special circumstances.

***Personal data provided by applicants will be kept confidential and used for recruitment purpose only***** Under the equal condition of qualifications and experience, priority will be given to Macao permanent residents**

http://www.um.edu.mo

Assistant Professor in Artificial IntelligenceElectrical and Computer Engineering

Herbert Wertheim College of EngineeringUniversity of Florida

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering (HWCOE) at the University of Florida (UF) invites applications for four full-time, nine-month tenure-track faculty positions at the rank of Assistant Professor. The open positions are for candidates working in one or more of the following areas related to Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machine Learning and Climate, Self-Aware AI Computing Systems, AI of Things, and Cognitive Architectures. The successful candidates are expected to have a doctoral degree in a relevant engineering field at the time of hire. The anticipated start date for the position is Fall 2022 with some flexibility for a later start based on individual needs. The University of Florida is an equal opportunity institution.

Additional information about the position, department, and application package is available at

https://facultyjobs.hr.ufl.edu/posting/96173

https://facultyjobs.hr.ufl.edu/posting/96127

https://facultyjobs.hr.ufl.edu/posting/96148

https://facultyjobs.hr.ufl.edu/posting/96168

Please email any questions to search-AI@ece.ufl.edu

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  69

Associate/Assistant Professor in Intelligent Sensing and Network Communication(Ref. No.: IOTSC/AAP/ISNC/06/2021)

The University of Macau (UM) is the only public comprehensive university in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) located at the west bank of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The GBA is rapidly developing into one of the leading technology and innovation hubs of the world. With a scenic campus of approximately 1 km2 on Hengqin island, UM has achieved significant progress in the past decade as evidenced by its rising international repute, state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities, and the establishment of three State Key Laboratories in microelectronics, Chinese medical sciences, and internet of things for smart city. To support economic diversification of MSAR and deepen collaboration between MSAR and Guangdong Province in Hengqin island, UM will continue to invest in cutting-edge research and develop interdisciplinary programmes in key strategic areas including precision oncology, advanced materials, regional oceanography, artificial intelligence and robotics, data science, cognitive and brain science and economics and finance. Leveraging its ‘4-in-1’ model of education and the largest residential college system in Asia, UM provides all-round undergraduate education, nurturing talent to support social and economic development in MSAR and the GBA as a whole. With unprecedented growth and opportunities for development, UM offers promising career prospects to academics at all levels. It may be noted that English is the working language and the primary medium of instruction at UM.

The State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) invites applications for the position of Associate/Assistant Professor in the following disciplines:

• Internet of things• Intelligent sensing• Communications and networking

State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) - SKL-IOTSCThe State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) is expected to promote smart city development in prospective of IoT, Big Data Technology and Engineering in Macao and inject a fresh impetus to the development of the Greater Bay Area by enhancing research and training in the field and providing technical support plans for improving economic performance, people’s quality of life, and social management. More details about the State Key Laboratory are available from https://skliotsc.um.edu.mo/.

Faculty of Science and Technology - FSTFaculty of Science and Technology aims to provide programmes for undergraduate and graduate education with quality reaching international standard. It strives to become a research active unit advancing the knowledge of engineering and science, and serves the community and industry as an agent of technological innovation and educational advancement. Currently, about 90 faculty members from diverse international backgrounds serve in this faculty. More details about the Faculty of Science and Technology are available from

http://www.fst.um.edu.mo/.

Qualifications1. A PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering or related disciplines; 2. A distinguished record of internationally-recognized research and scholarship;3. Demonstrable competence in communication; and4. English is the working language, while knowledge in Chinese/Portuguese will be an advantage.

The selected candidate is expected to assume duty in the 1st quarter of 2022.

RemunerationA taxable annual remuneration starting from MOP828,100 (approximately USD102,230) will be commensurate with the successful applicants’ academic qualification and relevant professional experience. The current local maximum income tax rate is 12% but is effectively around 5% - 7% after various discretionary exemptions. Apart from competitive remuneration, UM offers a wide range of benefits, such as medical insurance, provident fund, on campus accommodation/housing allowance and other subsidies. Further details on our package are available at: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/learn-more/.

Application ProcedureApplicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details, and apply ONLINE. Review of applications will commence upon receiving applications and continue until the position is filled. Applicants may consider their applications not successful if they are not invited for an interview within 3 months of application.

Human Resources Section, Office of AdministrationUniversity of Macau, Av. da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

Website: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/; Email: vacancy@um.edu.moTel: +853 8822 8577; Fax: +853 8822 2412

The effective position and salary index are subject to the Personnel Statute of the University of Macau in force. The University of Macau reserves the right not to appoint a candidate. Applicants with less qualification and experience can be offered lower positions under special circumstances.

***Personal data provided by applicants will be kept confidential and used for recruitment purpose only***** Under the equal condition of qualifications and experience, priority will be given to Macao permanent residents**

http://www.um.edu.mohttp://www.um.edu.mo

Faculty Position in Electrical EngineeringDepartment of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

The Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Electrical Engineering at the Assistant Professor level. Appointments will be considered for starting dates as early as July 1, 2022. Candidates must have a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field.

The search is focused in the areas of micro/nanosystems and integrated circuits, with a strong emphasis in applications related to human health and symbiotic integration of humans with machines in wearable and implantable fashion. In micro/nanosystems, the department is looking for candidates with expertise in novel devices, heterogeneous integration, flexible/wearable systems and advanced packaging. In circuits and instrumentation, the department is particularly interested in candidates with expertise in analog/mixed-signal integrated circuits for sensor interfacing. The department is particularly interested in candidates with experience in both focus areas.

Additional information about the position, department, and application package is available at

https://engineering.case.edu/ecse/employment.

CWRU provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application and hiring process should call 216-368-3066.

The department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (EECE) at Marquette University seeks candidates for a tenure-track faculty position in Computer Engineering starting in August 2022. Appointment will be at the assistant-professor level. Faculty duties include teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, research, and supervision of graduate students. Candidates with expertise in computer vision are especially encouraged to apply.

The EECE Department has 15 faculty, including 3 IEEE Fellows and one IEEE Technical Field Award recipient, one full-time adjunct, several part-time adjuncts, and nearly 180 undergraduate and 70 graduate students. EECE offers ABET-accredited B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Graduate degrees include five-year B.S./M.S., two certificates, M.S., and Ph.D. EECE research is on a steep upward trajectory, both in terms of funding and graduate enrollment, with many ongoing internal and external collaborations, including the industry.

Please submit a complete application by January 15, 2022. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled. Please include a letter of intent, curriculum vitae, teaching philosophy, research statement, and a list of three references. For further information and application go to: https://employment.marquette.edu/postings/15534. Marquette University is an Equal Opportunity Employer; those from underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply.

70  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

University of Southern CaliforniaFaculty Positions

Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The University of Southern California, one of the nation’s top research universities, invites applications for tenured and tenure-track positions in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (https://minghsiehece.usc.edu/) in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. We are looking for outstanding faculty candidates in all areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering at all ranks.

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty and welcome applications from women, those of African, Hispanic and Native American descent, veterans, and individuals with disabilities.

While outstanding candidates from all areas of electrical and computer engineering will be considered, candidates with research interests in the following areas are especially encouraged to apply: trust/privacy/security, experimental quantum engineering, circuits and systems for AI at the edge, computing for ML and AI at scale, energy-efficient sensing and computing, bio-sensors and bio-interface circuits and systems, computational imaging systems, and human-centered machine intelligence.

Faculty members are expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses, mentor undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral researchers, and develop a strong funded research program. Interdisciplinary and collaborative research is strongly encouraged. Applicants must have a Ph.D. degree, or the equivalent, in electrical and computer engineering or a related field and a strong research and publication record. Applications must include a letter clearly indicating area(s) of specialization, a detailed curriculum vitae, a concise statement of current and future research directions, and contact information for at least four professional references. Applicants are encouraged to include a succinct statement on fostering an environment of diversity and inclusion. This material should be submitted electronically at https://facultypositions.usc.edu/FAS/application/position?postingId=REQ20108603. Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications submitted after January 15th, 2022,

may not be considered.

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is among the top tier of engineering schools in the world. It counts 189 full-time, tenure-track faculty members, and is home to the Information Sciences Institute. The School is affiliated with the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, the Institute for Creative Technologies, and the USC Stevens Center for Innovation. Research expenditures typically exceed $210 million annually.

USC is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law or USC policy. USC will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring ordinance.

Ming Hsieh Department ofElectrical and Computer Engineering

Open Faculty Positions in ESEMultiple Faculty Positions

The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania isgrowing its faculty by 33% over a five-year period. As part of this initiative, theDepartment of Electrical and Systems Engineering is engaged in an aggressive,multi-year hiring effort for multiple tenure-track positions at all levels. Candidatesmust hold a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, SystemsEngineering, or related area. The department seeks individuals with exceptionalpromise for, or proven record of, research achievement, who will take a position ofinternational leadership in defining their field of study and who will excel inundergraduate and graduate education. Leadership in cross-disciplinary andmulti-disciplinary collaborations is of particular interest. We are interested incandidates in all areas that enhance our research strengths in:1. Nanodevices and nanosystems (nanoelectronics, MEMS/NEMS, power

electronics, nanophotonics, nanomagnetics, quantum devices, integrateddevices and systems at nanoscale);

2. Circuits and computer engineering (analog, RF, mm-wave, digital circuits,emerging circuit design, computer engineering, IoT, beyond 5G, and cyber-physical systems);

3. Information and decision systems (control, optimization, robotics, datascience, machine learning, communications, networking, informationtheory, signal processing).

Diversity candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. Interested persons shouldsubmit an online application by following the links above and include curriculumvitae, research, teaching, and diversity statements, and at least three references.Review of applications will begin on January 4, 2022.

https://apptrkr.com/2522480

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Graduate School of Engineering and Management

Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT)Dayton, Ohio

Faculty Position

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology is seeking applications for a tenured or tenure-track faculty position. All academic ranks will be considered. Applicants must have an earned doctorate in Electrical Engineering or a closely affiliated discipline by the time of their appointment (anticipated 1 September 2022).

We are particularly interested in applicants specializing in one or more of the following areas: radar cross section analysis, low observables, electromagnetic scattering analysis, computational electromagnetics, antennas and propagation, or microwave theory and measurements. Applicants having experience in the electromagnetic survivability community are highly desired. This position requires teaching at the graduate level as well as establishing and sustaining a strong Department of Defense relevant externally funded research program with a sustainable record of related peer-reviewed publications.

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) is the premier Department of Defense institution for graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and management, and has a Carnegie Classification as a High Research Activity Doctoral University. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering offers accredited M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science as well as an MS degree program in Cyber Operations.

For more information on the position and how to apply, please visit https://www.afit.edu/ENG/page.cfm?page=1232

Applicants must be U.S. citizens and currently hold or be able to obtain a security clearance. More information on AFIT and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering can be found at http://www.afit.edu/ENG/. Review of applications will begin on January 3, 2022. The United States Air Force is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringGraduate School of Engineering and Management

Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT)Dayton, Ohio

Faculty Position

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology is seeking applications for a tenured or tenure-track faculty position. All academic ranks will be considered. Applicants must have an earned doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely affiliated discipline by the time of their appointment (anticipated 1 September 2020).

We are particularly interested in applicants specializing in one or more of the following areas: autonomy, artificial intelligence / machine learning, navigation with or without GPS, cyber security, and VLSI. Candidates in other areas of specialization are also encouraged to apply. This position requires teaching at the graduate level as well as establishing and sustaining a strong DoD relevant externally funded research program with a sustainable record of related peer-reviewed publications.

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) is the premier Department of Defense (DoD) institution for graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and management, and has a Carnegie Classification as a High Research Activity Doctoral University. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering offers accredited M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science as well as an MS degree program in Cyber Operations.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens. Full details on the position, the department, applicant qualifications, and application procedures can be found at http://www.afit.edu/ENG/ . Review of applications will begin on January 6, 2020. The United States Air Force is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  71

Chair/Distinguished/Full Professor in Urban Big Data and Intelligent Technology (Ref. No.: IOTSC/CDF/BD/09/2021)

The University of Macau (UM) is the only public comprehensive university in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) located at the west bank of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The GBA is rapidly developing into one of the leading technology and innovation hubs of the world. With a scenic campus of approximately 1 km2 on Hengqin island, UM has achieved significant progress in the past decade as evidenced by its rising international repute, state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities, and the establishment of three State Key Laboratories in microelectronics, Chinese medical sciences, and internet of things for smart city. To support economic diversification of MSAR and deepen collaboration between MSAR and Guangdong Province in Hengqin island, UM will continue to invest in cutting-edge research and develop interdisciplinary programmes in key strategic areas including precision oncology, advanced materials, regional oceanography, artificial intelligence and robotics, data science, cognitive and brain science and economics and finance. Leveraging its ‘4-in-1’ model of education and the largest residential college system in Asia, UM provides all-round undergraduate education, nurturing talent to support social and economic development in MSAR and the GBA as a whole. With unprecedented growth and opportunities for development, UM offers promising career prospects to academics at all levels. It may be noted that English is the working language and the primary medium of instruction at UM.

The State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) invites applications for the position of Chair/Distinguished/Full Professor, who will also be a joint faculty member in the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the following disciplines:

• Big Data Analysis Technologies• Artificial Intelligence (AI) (e.g. Machine Learning (ML), Intelligent Information Processing)

State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) - SKL-IOTSCThe State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) is expected to promote smart city development in prospective of IoT, Big Data Technology and Engineering in Macao and inject a fresh impetus to the development of the Greater Bay Area by enhancing research and training in the field and providing technical support plans for improving economic performance, people’s quality of life, and social management. More details about the State Key Laboratory are available from https://skliotsc.um.edu.mo/.

Faculty of Science and Technology - FSTFaculty of Science and Technology aims to provide programmes for undergraduate and graduate education with quality reaching international standard. It strives to become a research active unit advancing the knowledge of engineering and science, and serves the community and industry as an agent of technological innovation and educational advancement. Currently, about 90 faculty members from diverse international backgrounds serve in this faculty. More details about the Faculty of Science and Technology are available from

http://www.fst.um.edu.mo/.

Qualifications1. A PhD degree in Science, Engineering or related disciplines; 2. Candidates should have considerable experience in academic development planning, curriculum design and research development, and strive to pursue excellence in teaching, research and service with outstanding academic leadership skills for research and development;3. A distinguished record of internationally-recognized research and scholarship;4. Demonstrable competence in communication; and5. English is the working language, while knowledge in Chinese/Portuguese will be an advantage.

The selected candidate is expected to assume duty in the 1st quarter of 2022.

RemunerationA taxable annual remuneration starting from MOP1,210,300 (approximately USD149,420) will be commensurate with the successful applicants’ academic qualification and relevant professional experience. The current local maximum income tax rate is 12% but is effectively around 5% - 7% after various discretionary exemptions. Apart from competitive remuneration, UM offers a wide range of benefits, such as medical insurance, provident fund, on campus accommodation/housing allowance and other subsidies. Further details on our package are available at: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/learn-more/.

Application ProcedureApplicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details, and apply ONLINE. Review of applications will commence upon receiving applications and continue until the position is filled. Applicants may consider their applications not successful if they are not invited for an interview within 3 months of application.

Office of the Vice Rector (Academic Affairs)University of Macau, Av. da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

Website: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/; Email: senior.academic@um.edu.mo Tel: +853 8822 8061; Fax: +853 8822 2452

The effective position and salary index are subject to the Personnel Statute of the University of Macau in force. The University of Macau reserves the right not to appoint a candidate. Applicants with less qualification and experience can be offered lower positions under special circumstances.

***Personal data provided by applicants will be kept confidential and used for recruitment purpose only***** Under the equal condition of qualifications and experience, priority will be given to Macao permanent residents**

http://www.um.edu.mo

Faculty Position in Electrical EngineeringDepartment of Electrical, Computer,

and Systems EngineeringCase Western Reserve

University, Cleveland, Ohio

The Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Electrical Engineering at the Assistant Professor level. Appointments will be considered for starting dates as early as January 1, 2022. Candidates must have a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field.

The search is focused on the broader area of robotics. The department is particularly interested in candidates with expertise in human-in-the-loop and human-collaborative robotic systems. Candidates specializing in machine learning as applied to robotic and other embodied artificially intelligent systems, and/or modeling of human behavior in human-robot systems will be of particular interest.

Additional information about the position, department, and application package is available at https://engineering.case.edu/ecse/employment.

CWRU provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Applicants requiring

a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application and hiring process should call

216-368-3066.

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420,000+ members in 160 countries. Embrace the largest, global, technical community.People Driving Technological Innovation.

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#IEEEmember

72  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Electrical Engineering Tenure-Track FacultyPosition in Power Electronics

The Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) in the School of Electrical Engineeringand Computer Science (EECS) at the Pennsylvania State University invites applicationsfor a tenure-track or tenured faculty position.We seek exceptional candidates interestedin establishing and sustaining outstanding research programs in modeling simulationand design of power electronics hardware and wide-bandgap devices in powerconverters for applications including smart grid, electric vehicles, robotics, and datacenters. The EE department has a variety of related research activities and state-of-the-artpower system facilities including a Real Time Digital Simulator and a Regenerative GridSimulator. These research activities are connected to university-level research institutes,such as the Institutes of Energy and the Environment (iee.psu.edu) and the MaterialsResearch Institute (mri.psu.edu). Successful candidates will be expected to propose anexciting research plan and to be inspiring teachers at both the undergraduate andgraduate levels. Candidates must have a doctorate in electrical engineering, or a relateddiscipline completed before the position's start date. Successful candidates for AssistantProfessor will demonstrate a strong research potential and commitment to graduateand undergraduate education. Candidates for Associate Professor will have a strongtrack record of research, publications, and funding. Candidates for Full Professor willhave a track record of research, publications, and funding that distinguishes themnationally and internationally.

The EE Department has 40 tenured/tenure-track faculty members, with annual researchexpenditures of over $18 million. The undergraduate (juniors and seniors) andgraduate programs enroll over 450 and 240 students, respectively. The Department iscommitted to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its forms. We embraceindividual uniqueness, foster a culture of inclusion that supports both broad andspecific diversity initiatives, and leverage the educational and institutional benefits ofdiversity. We value inclusion as a core strength and an essential element of our publicservice mission. In welcoming every candidate, we strive to meet the needs ofprofessional families by actively assisting with partner-placement needs. Additionalinformation about the Department can be found at www.eecs.psu.edu.

Applications will be considered until the positions are filled. Applicants should submitthe following: cover letter, curriculum vita, statement of research, statement of teaching,statement of commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion, and the names andaddresses of four references. Please address all inquiries and nominations to Prof.Daniel Lopez (dlopez@psu.edu), Chair of the Search Committee, or Ms. Taylor Doksa(tce5018@psu.edu). Application reviews will begin on December 1, 2021, and willcontinue until the positions are filled.

To Apply, visit: https://apptrkr.com/2600150

CAMPUS SECURITY CRIME STATISTICS: For more about safety at Penn State, and toreview the Annual Security Report which contains information about crime statistics andother safety and securitymatters,please go to http://www.police.psu.edu/clery/,whichwillalso provide you with detail on how to request a hard copy of the Annual Security Report.

Penn State is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer, and is committed toproviding employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race,color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability orprotected veteran status.

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DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  73

Chair/Distinguished/Full Professor in Intelligent Sensing and Network Communication(Ref. No.: IOTSC/CDF/ISNC/06/2021)

The University of Macau (UM) is the only public comprehensive university in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) located at the west bank of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). The GBA is rapidly developing into one of the leading technology and innovation hubs of the world. With a scenic campus of approximately 1 km2 on Hengqin island, UM has achieved significant progress in the past decade as evidenced by its rising international repute, state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities, and the establishment of three State Key Laboratories in microelectronics, Chinese medical sciences, and internet of things for smart city. To support economic diversification of MSAR and deepen collaboration between MSAR and Guangdong Province in Hengqin island, UM will continue to invest in cutting-edge research and develop interdisciplinary programmes in key strategic areas including precision oncology, advanced materials, regional oceanography, artificial intelligence and robotics, data science, cognitive and brain science and economics and finance. Leveraging its ‘4-in-1’ model of education and the largest residential college system in Asia, UM provides all-round undergraduate education, nurturing talent to support social and economic development in MSAR and the GBA as a whole. With unprecedented growth and opportunities for development, UM offers promising career prospects to academics at all levels. It may be noted that English is the working language and the primary medium of instruction at UM.

The State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) invites applications for the position of Chair/Distinguished/Full Professor, who will also be a joint faculty member in the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the following disciplines:

• Internet of things• Intelligent sensing• Communications and networking

State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) - SKL-IOTSCThe State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (University of Macau) is expected to promote smart city development in prospective of IoT, Big Data Technology and Engineering in Macao and inject a fresh impetus to the development of the Greater Bay Area by enhancing research and training in the field and providing technical support plans for improving economic performance, people’s quality of life, and social management. More details about the State Key Laboratory are available from

https://skliotsc.um.edu.mo/.

Faculty of Science and Technology - FSTFaculty of Science and Technology aims to provide programmes for undergraduate and graduate education with quality reaching international standard. It strives to become a research active unit advancing the knowledge of engineering and science, and serves the community and industry as an agent of technological innovation and educational advancement. Currently, about 90 faculty members from diverse international backgrounds serve in this faculty. More details about the Faculty of Science and Technology are available from

http://www.fst.um.edu.mo/.

Qualifications1. A PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering or related disciplines; 2. Candidates should have considerable experience in academic development planning, curriculum design and research development, and strive to pursue excellence in teaching, research and service with outstanding academic leadership skills for research and development;3. A distinguished record of internationally-recognized research and scholarship;4. Demonstrable competence in communication; and5. English is the working language, while knowledge in Chinese/Portuguese will be an advantage.

The selected candidate is expected to assume duty in the 1st quarter of 2022.

RemunerationA taxable annual remuneration starting from MOP1,210,300 (approximately USD149,420) will be commensurate with the successful applicants’ academic qualification and relevant professional experience. The current local maximum income tax rate is 12% but is effectively around 5% - 7% after various discretionary exemptions. Apart from competitive remuneration, UM offers a wide range of benefits, such as medical insurance, provident fund, on campus accommodation/housing allowance and other subsidies. Further details on our package are available at: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/learn-more/.

Application ProcedureApplicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details, and apply ONLINE. Review of applications will commence in August 2021 and continue until the position is filled. Applicants may consider their applications not successful if they are not invited for an interview within 3 months of application.

Office of the Vice Rector (Academic Affairs)University of Macau, Av. da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

Website: https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/; Email: senior.academic@um.edu.mo Tel: +853 8822 8061; Fax: +853 8822 2452

The effective position and salary index are subject to the Personnel Statute of the University of Macau in force. The University of Macau reserves the right not to appoint a candidate. Applicants with less qualification and experience can be offered lower positions under special circumstances.

***Personal data provided by applicants will be kept confidential and used for recruitment purpose only***** Under the equal condition of qualifications and experience, priority will be given to Macao permanent residents**

http://www.um.edu.mo

THE UNT G. BRINT RYAN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS IS NOW SEEKING:

PROFESSOR & G. BRINT RYAN ENDOWED CHAIR OF ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE AND/OR CYBERSECURITY

APPLY TODAY:

74  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

Faculty Position Professor (Tenured) and Center Director Winston Chung Global Energy Center (WCGEC)

University of California, Riverside

The University of California, Riverside’s (UCR) Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) invites applications for a Professor with Tenure position, who will serve as the Director of the BCOE Winston Chung Global Energy Center (WCGEC). The successful candidate will be responsible for managing and leading the Center, in addition to regular faculty duties that involve research and teaching. Successful candidates should have a proven and active record of vibrant leadership experience and externally funded research. While all qualified candidates will be considered, distinguished scientists in academia, senior industry leaders, and senior lead scientists in government research laboratories are particularly encouraged to apply.

Apply at https://aprecruit.ucr.edu/JPF01467. Details and application materials can be found at http://www.engr.ucr.edu/about/employment.html. Review of applications will begin December 14, 2021; the position is open until filled. The successful candidate is expected to begin July 1, 2022. Salary is commensurate with experience. Advancement through the faculty ranks at the UC is through a series of structured, merit-based evaluations, occurring every 2-3 years, each of which includes substantial peer input.UCR is a world-class research university with an exceptionally diverse undergraduate student body. Its mission is explicitly linked to providing routes to educational success for underrepresented and first-generation college students. A commitment to this mission is a preferred qualification.

EEO/AA/ADA/Vets Employer or any other characteristic protected by law.

University of California COVID-19 Vaccination Program Policy. As a condition of employment, you will be required to comply with the University of California SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Vaccination Program Policy. All covered individuals under the policy must provide proof of full vaccination or, if applicable, submit a request for exception (based on medical exemption, disability, and/or religious objection) or deferral (based on pregnancy) no later than the applicable deadline. For new University of California employees, the applicable deadline is eight weeks after their first date of employment.

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DECEMBER 2021  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  75

Endowed Professor Position in Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at San Diego State University has recently received a $3.5M gift from Eric and Peggy Johnson to establish The fred harris Endowed Chair in Digital Signal Processing. This endowment is to honor emeritus professor fred harris and his legacy of excellence and teaching in digital signal processing. Applications are invited for a tenured, endowed full professor position in the broad area of digital signal processing, with an anticipated start date of August 2022. The areas of interest include, but are not limited to, audio, image, and video processing, signal processing over networks, signal processing in communication systems, biomedical signal processing, and signal processing in cyber-physical systems. The applicants must hold a tenured associate or full professor appointment with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or closely related discipline, with an outstanding track record of scholarship and externally funded research. Additional information and application procedure are available at http://apply.interfolio.com/98514. Inquiries can be sent to Professor Sunil Kumar, Search Committee Chair, at skumar@sdsu.edu.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at San Diego State University also invites applications for a full-time tenure-track faculty position in Renewable Energy at the rank of Assistant Professor, with an anticipated start date of August 2022. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering or a closely related discipline. Qualified applicants must have expertise in renewable energy systems that may include one or more of the following areas: renewable energy systems grid integration and its scientific foundations; advanced power electronics for grid applications and transportation electrification; big data analytics, forecasting, and artificial intelligence for renewable energy applications; and cybersecurity for the electric grid with the high-penetration level of renewable energy resources. Additional information and application procedures are available at https://apply.interfolio.com/98712. Requests for additional information should be directed to Professor Satish Sharma, Search Committee Chair, via email ssharma@sdsu.edu.

The successful candidate will be expected to establish and maintain a strong externally funded research program, achieve excellence in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, advise students, and participate in departmental governance.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is strongly committed to excellence in both research and teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The department offers an ABET-accredited B.S. degree program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, M.S. program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a joint Ph.D. program in Electrical Engineering. The ECE Department has over 30 full-time and part-time faculty members, including 3 IEEE Fellows. Research areas in the department include- analog and digital integrated circuits, computer networks, embedded systems, signal processing and communication systems, antennas, RF and electromagnetic compatibility, machine learning and artificial intelligence, power electronics and smart grid. Additional information about the department and university can be found at http://electrical.sdsu.edu/ and http://www.sdsu.edu.We encourage candidates to send applications as soon as possible. Application review will start from January 15, 2022, and will continue until the position is filled. Candidates should submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and teaching and research statements, diversity statement, and names and contact information of three (3) references.

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HISTORY IN AN OBJECT BY ALLISON MARSH

cheap and colorful LEDs and compact electronics. Homeowners can illuminate the eaves with iridescent icicles, shroud their shrubs with twinkling mesh nets, or mount massive menorahs on their minivans. But decorative lights aren’t new. Edward Johnson, vice president of the Edison Electric Light Co., is credited with introducing the first electric Christmas lights on 22 December

Whether for religious or secular celebrations, twinkling lights mark many of December’s festivities. In recent years, the variety and functionality of electric lights have exploded, abetted by

1882. At the time, few households had electricity, and so holiday lights remained the playthings of the wealthy elite until electrification and more affordable fixtures (like this creepy 1925 doll’s head bulb) spread to the masses. n

It’s a Wonderful Light

FOR MORE ON THE HISTORY OF DECORATIVE LIGHTING, SEE spectrum.ieee.org/pastforward-dec2021 D

IVISION OF CULTURAL AND COMMUNITY LIFE/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

76  SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG  DECEMBER 2021

IEEE Spectrum’s new ROBOTS site features more than 200 robots from around the world.

• Spin, swipe and tap to make robots move.

• Read up-to-date robotics news.

• Rate robots and check their ranking.

• View photography, videos and technical specs.

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