Professor Sunil Bhave wins the IEEE Cady Award
Sunil A. Bhave, professor in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has won the 2023 Walter G. Cady Award. The honor comes from the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society (UFFC-S) to recognize technical contributions in the field of piezoelectric frequency control devices.
Bhave won the award in recognition of recent breakthroughs in Piezoelectric-MEMS enabled frequency control of light in microresonators and diamond color centers.
Professor Cady led the development of the first circuit to control frequencies based on a vibrating quartz crystal resonator in the early 20th century. His piezoelectric quartz oscillators advanced ultrasonics, sonar, and radar. These circuit building blocks are now ubiquitous in daily life through their use in everything from quartz wristwatches to cell phones. In the 21st century, light and atoms have replaced sound waves as the gold standard; The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) keeps time using optical transitions of atoms because they have superior stability, while optical frequency combs are used to divide the optical clock frequencies down to RF.
“My research combines the best of all these worlds; we use microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to mechanically tune optical microresonators that generate frequency combs,” says Bhave. “While piezoelectric crystals may no longer be the preferred frequency standard, my research group uses piezoMEMS resonant actuators developed at the Birck Nanotechnology Center to control frequencies of chip-scale frequency combs and microwave transitions in atom-like systems such as defect centers in diamond.”
The award will be formally presented at the 2023 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium on May 19th in Toyama, Japan. Bhave joined the faculty of Purdue ECE in 2015. He is the principal investigator of the OxideMEMS Lab, which explores inter-domain coupling in Opto-Mechanical, Spin-Acoustic and Atom-MEMS devices. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2007, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008, the IEEE UFFC Society’s Young Investigator Award in 2014, and the Google Faculty Research Award in 2020. His students have received Best Paper Awards at IEEE MEMS 2023 and 2021, IEEE Frequency Control Symposium 2021 and 2020, IEEE Photonics 2012, Ultrasonics 2009 and IEDM 2007.