Afshari

Ehsan Afshari, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award for his work in designing integrated circuits.

The five-year, $400,000 award will fund Afshari's ongoing research into circuits that can generate signals at terahertz frequencies and process information at very high speeds with low power consumption and using standard silicon processes.

The research, Afshari says, hopefully will lead to new methods of circuit design in which devices can operate close to or even beyond their maximum power levels. He will attempt to demonstrate novel high-frequency signal generation and processing systems, with orders of magnitude better performance in terms of maximum output power, operating frequency, power efficiency and bandwidth, compared with existing models.

Afshari, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2006, hopes the results will have a "transformative impact" on electronic systems, including communication devices, radars, signal sources and processors.