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Strategic Research Areas

At Cornell, we have categorized our research into five strategic areas. Explore them below.

Research in Electrical and Computer Engineering covers an extremely broad range of topics. Whether in computer architecture, energy and power systems or in nanotechnology devices, the research conducted in ECE is at the cutting edge of technological and scientific developments. 

Computer Engineering

Computer engineering concerns itself with the understanding and design of hardware needed to carry out computation, as well as the hardware-software interface. It is sometimes said that computer engineering is the nexus that connects electrical engineering and computer science. Research and teaching areas with a significant computer engineering component include digital logic and VLSI design, computer architecture and organization, embedded systems and Internet of things, virtualization and operating systems, code generation and optimization, computer networks and data centers, electronic design automation, or robotics.

Related Research Areas

Information, Systems and Networking

Our research and courses focus on fundamental aspects of information acquisition, processing, security, privacy, storage, and communication.

We are interested in problems arising in a broad range of applications, such as wireless and wireline communication systems, cellular systems and WiFi, heterogeneous and ad-hoc networks, peer-to-peer systems, big data, and the smart grid. Through our research and courses, students will learn how data is communicated in the presence of interference. Our students will learn powerful technologies for compressing and protecting data, as well as techniques for efficiently routing data in wired and wireless systems. Finally, they will see how our critical infrastructure, from cellular to the smart grid, are complex information systems that hold the promise for a wide variety of applications.

Related Research Areas

High Energy Density Plasma Physics, Electromagnetics

Electromagnetics involves a variety of applications of electromagnetic wave propagation and other time-varying phenomena in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. Plasma science involves the interaction of large numbers of charged particles with electric and magnetic fields in a variety of configurations ranging from the surface of the sun to the interior of fluorescent electric light bulbs.

At Cornell, we specialize in High Energy Density Laboratory Plasma (HEDLP) research, in which the product of the density of the ionized matter (plasma) and its temperature (more than a million degrees C) that it exceeds the ability to of any material to confine it even for a tiny fraction of a second. An example of a high energy density plasma is the center of the sun, where the plasma is 15 million degrees kelvin, the density is 1000 times the density of normal matter on earth, and gravity is the confinement method. In our laboratories, we use pulsed power generators to produce very large currents – 300,000-1,000,000 amperes – to produce hot plasmas and then we use the high magnetic fields produced by the currents to confine the plasmas far away from material walls. This enables us to study the properties of 1-25 million degree high density plasmas for times up to 0.1 microsecond using many different measurement techniques. Applications of our experimental, theoretical and computer simulation results include possible approaches to fusion reactors and understanding high energy astronomical observations.

Related Research Areas

Solid State, Electronics, Optoelectronics, MEMs

Related Research Areas

Bio-Electrical Engineering

Biological and Biomedical Electrical Engineering (B2E2) consists of both applied and fundamental work to understand the complexity of biological systems at different scales, e.g., from a single neuronal or cancer cell, all the way to the brain or malignant tumor. B2E2 aims to develop new hardware and computational tools to identify, characterize, and treat diseases. In the physical domain, electrical engineering approaches to integrated microsystems lead to new biological and medical sensors. These sensors consist of state-of-the-art ultrasonic, RF, optical, MRI, CT, electrical impedance transducers.  The integration of sensors, electronics are used to develop implantable and wearable devices, with decreasing size, weight, and power and increased functionality. B2E2 microsystems can help create interfaces for sensing and actuation to help understand the physiological and pathological mechanisms of diseases, and enable advanced robotic interfaces in medicine.  Medical devices can generate vast amounts of data, which require both real-time and post-acquisition processing. B2E2 faculty, sometimes in collaboration with medical researchers, develop advanced computational tools to learn from and exploit data and apply artificial intelligence approaches to impact medical practice by improving: early disease detection, disease diagnosis, response to therapy assessment, and guided surgical procedures.

Related Research Areas

Strategic Research Areas

Computer Graphic

Hardware That Protects Against Software Attacks

ECE's Ed Suh and Zhiru Zhang and CS's Andrew C. Myers aim to develop both hardware architecture and design tools to provide comprehensive and provable security assurance for future computing systems against software-level attacks that exploit seven common vulnerability classes.

Image credit Beatrice Jin

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Computer Graphic

Re-architecting Next-Gen Computing Systems

Disaggregated architectures have the potential to increase resource capacity by 10 to 100 times server-centric architectures.

Image credit Beatrice Jin

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Computer Graphic

Re-imagining Computer System Memories

Interdisciplinary team will provide new insights and an entirely new paradigm for the semiconductor industry in the emerging era of big data.

Image credit Beatrice Jin

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The Martinez and Zhang Research Groups

Engineers to hack 50-year-old computing problem with new center

Cornell engineers are part of a national effort to reinvent computing by developing new solutions to the “von Neumann bottleneck,” a feature-turned-problem that is almost as old as the modern computer itself.

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Professors Dave Hammer and Bruce Kusse looking at the COBRA machine

The Laboratory of Plasma Studies: Uncovering mysteries of high energy density plasma physics

In the basement of Grumman Hall, an x-ray pulse produced by a hot, dense plasma – an ionized gas – lasting only fractions of a microsecond both begins and ends an experiment. Hidden within that fraction of time lies a piece of a puzzle—data that graduate students and staff scientists at the Laboratory of Plasma Studies (LPS) will use to better understand the mysterious physics behind inertial confinement fusion.

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Sophia Rocco working on the COBRA machine

Sophia Rocco: Hoping to make the world a better place through a potential renewable energy source

When she was looking at graduate schools, physics major Sophia Rocco thought she would be in a materials science program bridging her interests in electricity and magnetism and novel materials for solar cells. Chancing upon the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell, she discovered the Laboratory of Plasma Studies (LPS).

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The Laboratory of Plasma Studies with the COBRA machine in the foreground and students in the background

Finding the Ultimate Energy Source: Cornell’s Lab of Plasma Studies

Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, but it does not exist freely on the Earth’s surface. It must be artificially generated by heating or subjecting a neutral gas to a strong electromagnetic field. Located in the basement of Grumman Hall are two large pulse-power generators that create plasma by delivering extremely high currents to ordinary matter for short periods. These generators are part of the Lab of Plasma Studies at Cornell University.

Photo credit: Dave Burbank

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A schematic, left, of a gallium oxide vertical power field-effect transistor, and a scanning electron microscope image, right, of the transistor, showing a 330-nanometer-wide by 795-nanometer-long channel.

Vertical gallium oxide transistor high in power, efficiency

The research group led by Grace Xing and Debdeep Jena presented research on a new gallium oxide field-effect transistor at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology May 29-June 1.

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Molnar, Xing and Jena

Molnar, Jena and Xing join national consortium to develop future cellular infrastructure

Three Cornell faculty will be part of the newly established $27.5 million ComSenTer, a center for converged terahertz communications and sensing.

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Faculty members associated with Cornell NeuroNex

Data on the Brain

The NSF has found a willing partner at Cornell University in this quest to create technologies that will allow researchers to image the brain and the nervous system.

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