The Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering created the Elmore ECE Emerging Frontiers Centers initiative to encourage, enable and sustain collaborations among ECE faculty, and others across campus, in emerging research areas that will significantly advance the frontiers of knowledge and have transformative impact on society. The first such Center was established in 2021 and was focused on the crossroads of quantum and AI.

“When we started this initiative, we were resolved to think big,” said Dimitrios Peroulis, the Michael and Katherine Birck Head and Reilly Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Following up the launch of our first Elmore ECE Emerging Frontiers Center, we are now excited to announce two new field-defining Centers focused on Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and Semiconductors.”

“Today, more and more high-impact research is being done by interdisciplinary teams of faculty working closely with partners in industry,” said Mark Lundstrom, Interim Dean of Engineering and Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “These two centers will be examples of how, with adequate seed funding, committed faculty can advance knowledge and have transformative impact on society. We’re grateful for the generous support of the Elmore family that makes this possible.”

Center for Uncrewed Aircraft Systems

Yung-Hsiang Lu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Center for Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) will conduct research on advanced control algorithms and develop prototypes for safe, trustable, and economic autonomous UAS. UAS is a driver of many engineering research topics and has great potential to change many industries. This center is a multidisciplinary effort led by faculty from the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Center will establish flight corridors around Purdue campus. Together with the vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem and the aerospace industry, this center will become an innovation hub to commercialize relevant technologies. West Lafayette already has many industry leaders conducting research related to aerospace technologies, including Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories, Saab, and Rolls Royce. The center's goal is to make autonomous aerial delivery as common as ground delivery at Purdue campus. Professor Yung-Hsiang Lu is the center lead. Shreyas Sundaram, Marie Gordon Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the co-lead. The team includes Mary Comer, James Davis, Jing Gao, Mahsa Ghasemi; Jianghai Hu, C.S. George Lee, Philip E. Paré, Joy Wang, and Carla Zoltowski.

"UAV holds a lot of promises and excitement. This center will create a pathway from demonstration to commercialization,” said Lu.

The center will provide a tiered approach to create and evaluate commercially viable UAS technologies. The first tier uses simulation to evaluate control algorithms and artificial intelligence for situational understanding. The second tier builds miniature cities and conducts experiments in natural and controlled environments at Purdue UAS Research and Test Facility (PURT). PURT houses the largest indoor motion-capture environment in the world with an area of 20,000 sq ft and a ceiling 30 ft high. The motion-capture system provides ground truth data for algorithm development and enables virtual and augmented reality. The third tier conducts outdoor experiments with line of sight between the UAV and the researchers. The fourth tier launches experiments beyond line of sight.

"This project emphasizes the integration of the cyber and physical worlds,” says Sundaram. “Simulations will play crucial roles before launching physical experiments."

Students in VIP (Vertically Integrated Projects) will also be involved with the new center. In VIP, teams of undergraduate students from various years, disciplines and backgrounds work with faculty and graduate students on their efforts in scholarship and exploration.

"This center will be an essential part of VIP,” said Zoltowski, Director of VIP. “The multidisciplinary nature of this center fits VIP well.”

In addition to faculty from Purdue ECE, researchers include faculty from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Aviation and Transportation Technology, the School of Information Studies, the Purdue Research Foundation, and Purdue Policy Research Institute. This Elmore Center also collaborates with many other universities.

Rapid-HI Design Institute

Dan Jiao, Synopsys Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The goal of the Rapid-HI Design Institute is to automate the Heterogeneous Integration (HI) design from intent to fabrication. It is a multidisciplinary effort led by faculty from the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Dan Jiao, Synopsys Professor of ECE, Cheng-Kok Koh, Professor of ECE, and assistant professors of ECE Joy Wang and Qiang Qiu. The center also involves Ganesh Subbarayan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue, Olena Zhu, Senior Principal Engineer from Intel Corporation, and collaborates with other industry partners and research communities outside ECE.

“The team assembled for this institute leverages unique strengths and infrastructure in ECE, COE, and Purdue to conduct frontier research in the highly impactful HI area,” says Center Director Dan Jiao. “Strong partnership with industry leaders also provides the team with real-world benchmark to develop HI design automation tools. It bodes well for achieving preeminence in the near future.”

Heterogeneous integration (HI) is the assembly and packaging of individual components, such as CPUs, GPUs, memory, FPGAs, transceivers, and power regulators, which are separately manufactured or designed using diverse technologies and different semiconductor processes onto a single substrate.

HI constitutes a grand challenge in engineering since it must simultaneously address the electrical, optical, thermal, mechanical, and material challenges of integrating separately manufactured/designed components into a higher-level System-in-Package (SiP), for a diverse range of technologies (digital, analog, RF, microwave, Photonic, MEMS, etc.). Currently, HI is impeded by the lack of tools for design automation and optimization, and has become a bottleneck of the design flow.

The objective of the Rapid-HI Design Institute is to develop rapid and large-scale multiphysics modeling and analysis and multiphysics informed physical design to automate the HI design process. The Institute will fuse machine intelligence and domain expertise for significantly accelerated modeling, analysis, and optimization. This collaborative research effort will result in a rapid hardware compiler of HI systems enabled by multiphysics (electrical, thermal, and mechanical) design automation and will be used to transform the current manual, partially automated, and non-optimal practice of package and system design to fully automated and optimized design. The HI hardware compiler will be made open source, contributing to the design ecosystem, and the workforce development in HI and advanced packaging.