Monday, April 18, 2011
RF MEMS Switch Wins Research Expo 2011 / Watch Chirag Patel
University of California, San Diego electrical engineering Ph.D. student Chirag Patel won the top prize – the Rudee Outstanding Poster Award – at Research Expo 2011 for his work on RF MEMS metal-contact switches. The switches could make their way into MRIs and other medical equipment, satellites, and electronic instrumentation such as spectrum analyzers and signal sources. Search all Research Expo poster abstracts.
Read the full story on the Jacobs School news site.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Rudee Outstanding Poster / Grand Prize / Research Expo
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| ECE graduate student Chirag Dipak Patel winner of the Rudee Outstanding Poster at Research Expo 2011 |
Poster title and abstract are below. Check back tomorrow for more info on his research.
130. HIGH-POWER, LARGE-FORCE, AND TEMPERATURE-STABLE METAL CONTACT SWITCHES
Student(s): Chirag Dipak Patel
Professor(s): Gabriel Rebeiz
This poster presents a novel electrostatic RF MEMS metal contact switch based on a tethered cantilever topology. The use of tethers results in a design that has low sensitivity to stress gradients, biaxial stresses, and temperature. A switch with a footprint of 160x190 um^2 and based on a 8-u m thick gold cantilever with an Au/Ru contact is implemented on a high-resistivity silicon substrate and results in a total contact force of 0.8-1.2 mN at 80-90 V, a restoring force of 0.5 mN, a pull-in voltage of 61 V, an up-state capacitance of 24 fF, and an actuation time of 6.4 u s. The device achieves a switch resistance of 2.4 +/-1.4 to 1.8+/- 0.6 ohms at 90-100 V in open laboratory environments (unpackaged). This design has the potential serve as a low-cost and high-reliability replacement for conventional electromagnetic relays in application areas such as automated testing equipment, high performance switching networks, medical devices, satellite systems, and defense.
The top posters by department are here.
Research Expo 2011 Best Poster Winners (by Department)
Below are the winners of the top poster, by department at Research Expo 2011. Congrats! and stay tuned for the grand prize...the Rudee Outstanding Poster Award...
Bioengineering
#3 A Custom Integrated High Input Impedance Biopotential Amplifier for Non-Contact and Mobile Health (ECG/EEG) Monitoring
Yu Mike Chi (Professor Gert Cauwenberghs)
Computer Science and Engineering
# 79 Kremlin: Like Gprof, but for Parallelization
Donghwan Jeon, Saturnino Garcia (Professor Michael Taylor)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
#130 High-Power, Large-Force, and Temperature-Stable Metal Contact Switches
Chirag Dipak Patel (Professor Gabriel Rebeiz)
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
# 157 Investigating the Use of Wing Sweep for Pitch Control of a Small Unmanned Air Vehicle
Kim Wright, Saam Ostovari, Anand Vaidya (Professor Thomas Bewley)
NanoEngineering
#223 Biological Applications of Catalytic Nanomotors
Daniel R Kagan (Professor Joseph Wang)
Structural Engineering
#242 Thermal Stress and Buckling Detection in Rail by Non-Destructive Ultrasonic Testing
Claudio Nucera (Professor Francesco Lanza de Scalea)
Prepping for mobile blogging today from Research Expo
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
"Micro-Rockets" Aim at Cancer Diagnostics / Video
In a new study in the journal Angewandte Chemie, NanoEngineers from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering describe an immuno-micromachine-based approach for in vitro isolation of cancer cells that holds promise for direct circulating tumor cell (CTC) detection without sample preprocessing.
The work was led by two NanoEngineering professors: Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang.
Read the news story in Chemistry World by Kate McAlpine.
Related videos are here.
Professor Liangfang Zhang is one of the faculty speakers tomorrow at Research Expo here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Video Caption (see below): In the first section of the video, you can see the microrocket (black) selectively collect a pancreatic cancer cell. (The cell has a specific outside surface marker that the microrocket attaches to.) In the following three sections of the video, the microrocket is unable to collect the cancer cell, either because the rocket has not been modified, or because the cells do not express the right outside surface marker.
Video Caption (see below): In this 8-second video, a microrocket transports a pancreatic cancer cell in buffer solution and in human serum.
Update #1: New caption for the first video.
Update #2: Dan Kagan says this paper is going on the cover of an upcoming print issue.
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