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Bringing The Global Village Together

Building The Nation's Best Analog Mixed Signal Program

OSU's Analog/Mixed Signal research team gathers at Magenta Restaurant near campus. These five faculty plan to take the OSU program­already one of the best research programs of its kind in the nation­to the top. Pictured from left: Gabor Temes, Un-Ku Moon, team leader Terri Fiez, Huaping Liu, and Karti Mayaram.

A 26-year-old woman whose husband was recently paralyzed in a climbing accident has just reached the summit of Tanzania's snow-capped Mt. Kilimanjaro, the mountain Hemingway wrote was "as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." Wanting to give her husband the chance to see the view from Africa's highest peak, she takes out a small electronic device, activates the tiny web cam, and begins panning while she narrates. Her husband, watching on a surround screen from their home in Oregon, feels he's right there beside her. He asks if she's warm enough. She nods, blows him a real-time kiss, then watches him wipe away a tear.

An 8-year-old girl in Kathmandu needs a rare cardiac surgical procedure to save her life. But the nearest available surgeon who can perform the procedure is in Calgary, Canada. There is no time for travel; every minute counts. Using a wireless virtual reality communications system, the Canadian surgeon performs the operation literally from the other side of the planet, saving the girl's life. These are just two of the many applications a technology called analog/mixed signal (AMS) will bring to the world within the next few years. AMS helps translate real world information--a human heartbeat, the power of a tsunami wave, a diabetic's blood sugar level--into a digital form that can be processed and analyzed by computers. AMS will enable electronic devices such as PDAs to do everything from balancing your bank account to regulating your insulin level.

AMS will revolutionize wireless communication as we know it, and OSU's department of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) intends to be the No. 1 academic player in that revolution. Already, the OSU program is among the top few in the nation, and major corporations are lining up to partner with OSU, funding AMS research and snapping up graduates.

With a core team of just five faculty members (three of whom have won prestigious NSF Young Investigator Awards), the AMS program currently brings in $1.7 million in annual research funding--more than $1 million of which comes from bigname private industry partners like Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Inc., National Semiconductor, and others.

"These companies are seeking us out," says ECE department head Terri Fiez, who leads the OSU AMS team. "Industry doesn't do that unless they have something to gain."

Robert Meisenhelder, manager of research and development at Boston-based Analog Devices, Inc., agrees. "Our senior technologists visit OSU regularly to interact with faculty and students and stay current on research. Such visits are one measure of the relative importance of any engineering school. We wouldn't come on campus if there were little or no benefit to the company."

Texas Instruments also visits OSU to recruit engineers and fund research. "OSU has stood out for years in supplying TI with top AMS engineers," says Brian Evans, director of mixed signal communications at the company. "We recruit from OSU because we view OSU as a strategic partner for AMS engineering. OSU grads are well prepared for understanding the technical challenges the industry is facing."

The AMS program currently has 50 graduate students, but by 2010 Fiez and team plan to double that enrollment, increase faculty to 12, and be spinning off new AMSrelated companies that will impact the economy of Oregon and beyond.

"We have a real opportunity here," says Fiez. "Ten years ago, Portland was a high-tech desert, an electronics wannabe. But in the last decade, Oregon has come into its own and is recognized as a world leader in high technology. If we can continue to partner with industry in mixed signal, Oregon has a real chance of winning big--not only by the state retaining graduates from our programs, but by the ideas generated at OSU being spun off into local companies. It's a golden opportunity."

But the real winners will be the human beings whose lives are touched by this technology, the girl recovering in a Kathmandu hospital, the husband of the woman making her way back down Mt. Kilimanjaro in the setting sun.