1/26/2009 Charlie Johnson, ECE ILLINOIS
ECE PhD candidate Zhiguo Qian recently learned that his paper was selected as the “Best Student Paper” during the IEEE 17th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems.
Written by Charlie Johnson, ECE ILLINOIS
ECE PhD candidate Zhiguo Qian recently learned that his paper was selected as the “Best Student Paper” during the IEEE 17th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems. His paper was one of over 20 student papers entered in the competition.
“It’s great to see that our work is widely recognized. It’s always good to know that after a lot of hard work you can be rewarded,” said Qian.
The paper focused on a computational electromagnetics algorithm that Qian developed to model and analyze the electrical performance of the packaging of microchips. Microchip packaging is one of the final steps in semiconductor device fabrication in which the microchip is mounted onto a circuit board and connected to its larger system. The packaging of a microchip is very important because that packaging is responsible for transferring the computing power of the chip to other parts of the device, essentially acting as a conduit for the microchip to do its job. By improving the quality of the packaging, microchips can function faster and with greater energy efficiency. Qian’s modeling technique will help those working in the microchip industry design better packaging systems much more quickly and easily.
“Designers are facing very tight design cycles, so they can’t afford to wait days for results. We’re trying to provide them solutions in a short period of time,” said Qian. Using this sort of analysis, Qian hopes that engineers will be able to design more powerful devices.
Supervising Qian was ECE Professor Weng Cho Chew. “Ever since his [Qian’s] arrival, he has done excellently in his research. The work of Mr. Qian allows us to solve a multiscale complex structure problem in circuits and packaging involving over one million unknowns. As far as I know, no other methods can solve such a problem with as high efficiency as the solver developed by Mr. Qian,” said Chew, who holds the Y. T. Lo Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Despite the prestigious award, Qian’s paper only represents a portion of the research that he has done since beginning work on his doctoral dissertation over four years ago. The paper was the result of only about one of Qian’s four years of research in the field of computational electromagnetics. And while he would like to submit another paper at a future EPEP conference, Qian hopes to finish his dissertation and earn his PhD shortly. “This is the work that our group has been pursuing for a long time, so I don’t think that I will be the last one working on it,” said Qian.
The annual meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems was held in SanJose, California, October 27-29, 2008. It is a leading conference dealing with advanced and emerging issues in electrical design of interconnect structures and assurance of signal integrity. Next year’s conference will be held from October 19-21 in Portland, Oregon. Information on upcoming conferences can be found at www.epep.org.