Milosevic wins award for research on high-speed, low-power communications

1/25/2012 Reema Amin, ECE ILLINOIS

ECE alumnus Pavle Milosevic (MSEE '07, PhD '11), received the Best Poster Paper Award at the IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS).

Written by Reema Amin, ECE ILLINOIS

Pavle Milosevic
Pavle Milosevic

ECE alumnus Pavle Milosevic (MSEE '07, PhD '11), who was a graduate student in ECE until completing his degree this past December, finished his ECE career on a high note with the “Best Poster Paper Award” at the IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS) in San Jose, California, in the fall. The poster described his work on high-speed signaling systems.

The three-day conference hosted various events, including a poster presentation session.  Milosevic’s poster gave a concise design of a transceiver system that uses fundamental transmission-line modes for signaling.  With his design, low power usage can be achieved while maintaining the highest speed of communication between chips. 

“This design tackles real-life scenarios and can be applied to existing low-cost chip-to-chip communication systems,” Milosevic said.

Milosevic said the chips in devices like a cell phone or laptop can often have obstacles in maintaining good communication.  He added that the environment in which chips are embedded can cause some of these difficulties, with crosstalk between signaling lines limiting speeds and increasing power usage.

But, if a product’s chips can communicate virtually flawlessly, the most efficient power usage is attained by the product in question.

A number of other designs for efficient high-speed communication between chips have been proposed before his, Milosevic said, but so far, none have found widespread use in real-world products.

“There were four or five other approaches, but none of those can efficiently handle real-life problems,” Milosevic said. “The approaches are either too complex to implement or have limited efficiency, since they are not making full use of the underlying transmission line theory.”

His presentation also included a computer simulation of a CMOS-based implementation of the design.  Milosevic and his adviser, ECE Professor Jose E Schutt-Aine, hope to receive a grant to create a physical design based on the simulation.

Schutt-Aine said his experience with Milosevic was “one of the best” he has had with a graduate student.
“He showed a lot of independence and a lot of creativity,” Schutt-Aine said.

Since graduating, Milosevic has begun work at Intel Corporation.


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This story was published January 25, 2012.