Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering Department News - February 10, 2025

This week’s department meeting will include the following:

• Announcements: Bret on Assets and Capital (10 min.), Alex Plaut on ECEE Minors (10 min.)
• Science Talk: TBD
• Lunch: Sandwiches
• Main Agenda: CE degree discussion

The Graduate School Summer Fellowship supports doctoral students in advancing their dissertation research and writing over the summer term. Each department may submit one nominee, and we strongly encourage participation!

🔹 Award Amount: $7,500 (biweekly stipend over the summer)
🔹 Eligibility:

• Must advance to D status by the end of Spring 2025
• No university-sponsored summer 2025 funding
• Not receiving major fellowships for AY24/25 or AY25/26
• Preference for students without prior non-RA/TA/GA/GPTI funding in AY24/25

📅 Nomination Deadline: February 21, 2025
📩 Submit nominations to: Grad Committee 

We’ve compiled a list of Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 Graduating Students, and we encourage faculty and staff to review it for potential award nominations.

📅 Nomination Deadline: March 10, 2025
📩 Questions? Contact Mackenzie Hatcher for details on awards and requirements.

Nomination Form

📅 Date: Monday, February 10, 2025

⏰ Time: 11:10 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

📍 Location: Engineering Center, ECEE 1B32, CU Boulder

Zoom: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/99442200380

Abstract: Large-scale integration of renewables in the electric power grid is the critical pathway for tackling climate change and bringing a sustainable future. For it, power electronic systems play an essential role and are bringing a true paradigm shift in the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of electricity. Nevertheless, when it comes to ensuring stability and robustness of the emerging “electronic power grid”, high proliferation of power electronic converters poses major challenges. In this regard, the converters' control systems have a decisive impact. To enable their highly-sophisticated role of energy-processors, power electronic converters are actively controlled and their actuation is determined by the chosen modulation strategy. Nowadays, power electronic control systems are typically implemented using digital control platforms, as they offer much higher levels of flexibility and unmatched regulation capacities with respect to analog control systems. However, significant demerits of the digital control are the associated delays, which are not present when using analog controllers. In grid-tied converters, such delays may result in harmonic instability at high frequencies, where active damping schemes are ineffective in stabilizing the system. The focus of this talk is a high-performance digital modulation technique, the multi-sampled pulsewidth modulation (MS-PWM), which targets achieving analog-like dynamic performance while retaining all merits of the digital control systems. It is shown how, due to delay reduction, MS-PWM inherently increases converter’s dissipativity in a wide frequency range, thus enabling robust stability when connecting to the grid. Besides focusing on MS-PWM, the talk will explore a method for decentralized analysis and robust stabilization of power converters that operate in complex grid scenarios, such as meshed-grids, interlinking, and multi-port systems.

Bio: Ivan Petrić was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1994. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2023. From 2018 to 2019, he was a Researcher with the Power Electronics, Machines and Control Group, The University of Nottingham, U.K. In 2022, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Since 2023, he is with Hanwha Qcells Technologies Inc, Santa Clara, CA, USA, where he is leading an R&D team in advanced power electronics solutions for residential PV systems and energy storage. His research interests include modeling and control of power converters, advanced modulation strategies, and grid-connected converters for renewable energy sources and smart microgrids.

📅 Date: Friday, February 28, 2025

⏰ Time: 11:10 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

📍 Location: Koelbel Building: Leeds School of Business, 352

Abstract: High-performance systems are increasingly bottlenecked by the energy and communications costs of interconnecting numerous compute and memory resources. Current systems face a gap of nearly two orders of magnitude between on-chip, intra-socket, communication capacities, and the capacities of links transporting data over longer distances. The per bit energy cost of data movement dominates that of data processing, as does density, throughput, and latency. Integrated silicon photonics offer the opportunity of optical connectivity that delivers high off-chip communication bandwidth densities with low power consumption. To realize these benefits the co-integration of photonics with the compute and memory is critical. This talk will cover approaches for leveraging photonic IO that can scale to realize Petabit/s chip escape bandwidths with sub-picojoule/bit energy consumption, as well as new architectural approaches that enable flexible connectivity tailored to accelerate distributed AI/ML applications.

Bio: Keren Bergman is the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University where she also serves as the Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative. Bergman received the B.S. from Bucknell University in 1988, and the M.S. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1994 from M.I.T. all in Electrical Engineering. At Columbia, Bergman leads the Lightwave Research Laboratory encompassing multiple cross-disciplinary programs at the intersection of computing and photonics. Since 2023 Bergman is the Director of the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), a 5-year multi-university center funded by DARPA and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). Bergman serves on the Leadership Council of the American Institute of Manufacturing (AIM) Photonics leading projects that support the institute’s silicon photonics manufacturing capabilities and Datacom applications. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

📅 Date: Monday, March 10, 2025

⏰ Time: 11:10 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

📍 Location: Engineering Center, ECEE 1B32, CU Boulder

Bio: Dr. Frank Barnes is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Biomedical group of the Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Barnes received his B.S. from Princeton University in electrical engineering in 1954, his M.S. Engineer and PhD from Stanford University in 1955, 1956 and 1958. He joined the University of Colorado in 1959. He was appointed a Distinguished Professor in 1997. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 and received the Gordon Prize 2004 for innovations in Engineering Education from the National Academy. He is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS and served as Vice President of IEEE for publication and as Chairman of the Electron Device Society and President of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, and as U.S. Chair of Commission K-International Union of Radio Sciences (URSI). 

Local CO engineers: Join the High-Speed Digital Engineering PMP for an insightful IEEE talk by Dr. Tim Michalka, PhD, Electrical Engineer & Signal Integrity Expert.

📅 Date: February 13, 2025
⏰ Time: 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.
📍 Location: Rustandy Building, KOBL 352

Dr. Michalka will explore trends in interconnections between integrated circuits, signal integrity considerations, and cutting-edge 2D, 2.5D and 3D heterogeneous integration packaging technologies shaping the future.

🔗 Register now: IEEE Event Registration

Phase 1 of the secure computing initiative is underway. Please respond promptly to Bret Moreland and assistants’ requests for identifying every computer in use in offices and labs and return the required information. The completion date for this project is February 15. Questions about this initiative should be directed to Robin.Elliott@colorado.edu.

IT Support: 

• Teaching Labs (Capstone, Embedded Systems, Power Lab, Optics, RF, Highspeed Measurements, Circuits) IT Support: http://itll.link/servicedesk
• Research Labs License Server Support: support@craftypenguins.net
• Research Computing: https://www.colorado.edu/rc/
• Research License Server (ecee-flexlm-2.colorado.edu): Submit a request to: support@craftypenguins.net
• Conference Rooms ECEE 1B55 & 1B45: Send an email to ECEE IT support: http://itll.link/servicedesk
• IT Service Center: Contact the IT Service Center (303-735-4357 or help@colorado.edu) for help with all OIT services including email and IdentiKey, Internet connectivity and other technology-related questions.
• Buff Techs Desktop Support: OIT provides no-cost software support for laptop and desktop workstations to faculty, staff, and students. You can also register your laptop to aid in recovery in case it is lost or stolen.
• Dedicated Desktop Support: Departmental IT Support customized for your needs.
• Network Troubleshooting: Submit this form to report network connectivity issues on campus.
• Classroom Technology Problem Reporting form: Submit this form to report an issue with technology malfunctioning in a classroom (except for the ECEE classrooms – contact Bret.Moreland@colorado or 303-503-7939 for support)
• Self-Service Help Request: Submit a request directly to the ITSC using ServiceNow
• Lightboard: Contact  Andy Garcia, Andrew.Garcia-3@colorado.edu, in the Mechanical Engineering department for scheduling and technical assistance
• OIT Website https://oit.colorado.edu/support
• All other issues, contact Robin.McClanahan@colorado.edu or 303-492-6736.