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Student Research Contest Awards Student Innovation
The caliber of student research projects at last year's Intel Student Research Contest (ISRC) was so impressive that it inspired this year's winner. Notre Dame University junior Dane Wheeler came to Santa Clara, California, to participate in the ISRC, and left determined to come up with a project to snare a place in the competition during his senior year.
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The ISRC attracts some of today's best and brightest students in Intel's drive to support the use of cutting-edge technology in higher education, to promote research in emerging technology areas, and to develop future engineers and computer scientists to support tomorrow's technology needs. The goal of this competition is to stimulate inventiveness by challenging undergraduates in science and engineering disciplines to explore frontiers in computing. The effort supports existing undergraduate research at universities and complements senior honors projects.
To take part in this year's competition, university undergrads were invited to submit proposals for promising research projects. A committee then selected 17 finalists from 12 universities. Each finalist was awarded up to US$2,000, based on the research budget submitted with the proposal, and given nine months to conduct research under the supervision of a faculty advisor and an Intel technical advisor.
In April 2003, the finalists came to Santa Clara to share their projects and research results. Presentations were varied and included demonstrations of such innovations as a system potentially capable of tracking a firefighter inside a rapidly changing structural fire; a computer-assisted simulation tool that could assist surgeons in craniofacial surgery; and assessing the "health" of a community, based on pollution, crime, and cancer statistics.
The project taking top honors at this year's competition explores the replacement of electron-based logic circuits with those powered by light. The brain behind the project? Dane Wheeler, now a senior at Notre Dame.
"The goal," Wheeler explains, "was to create transparent, all-optical communications technology that enables switchers and routers to operate at the speed of incoming optical information, thereby eliminating current bottlenecks created by electronic switches." In short, this translates to creating technology that would allow for faster communications.
Further, Wheeler proposed that these faster communications could be realized using less space than current technology. With silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, he suggested, all-optical logic devices could be created on tiny SOI wafers via a common fabrication technique.
To test his thesis, Wheeler created a three-input XOR tree, a device for checking the parity of a communications signal. Although time constraints prevented Wheeler from connecting his creation to a laser to take conclusive measurements, he was able to perform computer simulations indicating that the device should work as intended.
While Wheeler initially hoped this work would lead to the development of "a light computer that was faster than electricity," he notes that the most practical current use for this technology is in communications.
Wheeler plans to continue working on the project through the summer and may even continue this line of research in graduate school. As for long-term goals, he says, "Eventually, I'd like to find an industry research position."
The ISRC is an annual event open to undergraduate students in science and engineering. More information about the competition can be found at Intel Student Research Contest 2003-04.
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