In the news

Purdue University has launched the Center for Secure Microelectronics Ecosystem (CSME) with support from industry partners and a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)-funded workforce development program. CSME is a first-of-its-kind global partnership of academia, industry and government to advance research and workforce development in designing secure microelectronics. Its aim is to help ensure a secure supply of semiconductor chips and related products and tools, from the foundry to the packaged system, based on a zero-trust model. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), one of the world’s largest semiconductor contract manufacturers, is an industry partner.

Two Purdue researchers have been selected as Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network (QISE-NET) triplet awardees. The “triplets” – a group consisting of a university principal investigator, an industrial or national laboratory mentor, and a graduate student – come from a variety of disciplines relevant to advancing the development of quantum technologies such as materials science, chemistry, device engineering, physics, computer science and industrial research. Prospective candidates were required to submit a short and focused proposal that represents leading-edge research topics in quantum information science/engineering with potential for growth and follow-on work between the student, company or national laboratory and academic groups.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials. A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions. The team’s work is published in Nature Communications. The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization helped secure a patent for the technology, and it is available for licensing.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you want power, you lose battery life. If you want battery life, you lose power. That’s the situation facing users of most electronic devices – and it’s also the dilemma for electronics manufacturers. Purdue University innovators have come up with an invention to help. “Battery life technology, for the most part, has not been able to keep up with the other technology that requires the battery,” said Saeed Mohammadi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue’s College of Engineering. “Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor [CMOS] is a battery-powered semiconductor chip inside computers and devices that stores information. CMOS requires a lot of power from the computer which, in turn, reduces the battery life.”

“You see, nature is unpredictable. How do you expect to predict it with a computer?” said American physicist Richard Feynman before computer scientists at a conference in 1981. Forty years later, Purdue University engineers are building the kind of system that Feynman imagined would overcome the limitations of today’s classical computers by more closely acting like nature: a “probabilistic computer.” The team believes that a probabilistic computer may sooner solve some of the problems a quantum computer would solve, since it wouldn’t need entirely new hardware or extremely cold temperatures to operate. On that list of problems to solve more efficiently than with classical computers are optimization problems – the ability to calculate the best solution from a very large number of solutions, such as identifying the best route for goods to travel to market.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – IdentifySensors Biologics, a Purdue University-affiliated technology firm developing a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, has entered into a new partnership with Purdue Research Foundation and will open an office in Purdue’s Discovery Park District. As the COVID-19 pandemic was about to break around the globe, IdentifySensors, the parent company of IdentifySensors Biologics, had approached Purdue to help it develop a nanosensor designed to detect spoilage and specific pathogens in the food supply chain. When the pandemic became apparent, the company pivoted to start working with Purdue researcher Lia Stanciu, associate head and professor of materials engineering, to develop a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Morse code has been around since the 1830s. The familiar dots and dashes system may seem antiquated given the amount of information needed to be acquired, digitally archived and rapidly accessed every day. But those same basic dots and dashes are still used in many optical media to aid in storage.

Zubin Jacob, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has won the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award 2021. This honor is given to exceptional IITB alumni from around the world below the age of 40. Jacob is being recognized for exceptional contributions in academia to the field of Photonics. The award winners are from diverse fields including academia, industry, start-ups, arts and entertainment, as well as social service. Jacob is one of five recipients in 2021.

Purdue professor Mark Lundstrom, who served as acting dean for College of Engineering for the past year, has contributed not only to minds in his classrooms at the University but to nanotechnology research and outreach around the world, and his service has been recognized with an Order of the Griffin presented by Purdue President Mitch Daniels. The Order of the Griffin is one of Purdue’s highest honors. The award recognizes outstanding service to Purdue by men and women whose commitment to the University has gone beyond the call of duty and has greatly benefited Purdue.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A hacker can reproduce a circuit on a chip by discovering what key transistors are doing in a circuit – but not if the transistor “type” is undetectable. Purdue University engineers have demonstrated a way to disguise which transistor is which by building them out of a sheet-like material called black phosphorus. This built-in security measure would prevent hackers from getting enough information about the circuit to reverse engineer it. The findings appear in a paper published Monday (Dec. 7) in Nature Electronics. Reverse engineering chips is a common practice – both for hackers and companies investigating intellectual property infringement. Researchers also are developing x-ray imaging techniques that wouldn’t require actually touching a chip to reverse engineer it.