The ECE team of Professor Jason Vaughn Clark and RA Prabhakar Marepalli have been awarded third place in the international Modeling and Simulation of Nano-Microsystems Contest sponsored by National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, or NNIN. The NNIN sites are at Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford.

The objectives of this contest were to provide publicity to new developments, recent progress, and advances in the modeling and simulation of Micro/Nanosystems. The emphasis is on current challenges in understanding of the multi-physics/multi-scale phenomena that govern such systems functionality. 

The ECE team was awarded the third place prize for advances in computer aided design of MEMS, which included novice-friendly design and simulation, fast wafer-level layout, computational verification, and experimental validation. The first place prize was awarded to a team from the University of Valencia, Spain, for their fast and accurate wet etching simulator for silicon and quartz MEMS. The second prize was awarded to a team from Stanford for their tool that simulates nonlinear electrophoretic processes. And a team that tied the ECE team for third place was from UIUC, which developed a tool that models hydrodynamic traps.