ECE student receives Ansoft Corporation Award

ECE graduate student Shih-Hao Lee was recently granted the Best Student Paper Award at the 16th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging for a paper on an improved electromagnetic full-wave analysis of multilayer printed circuit boards, or PCBs. He was one of two students to receive the honor.

Lee’s paper, entitled “Efficient Full-Wave Analysis of Multilayer Interconnection Structures Using a Novel Domain Decomposition–Model Order Reduction Method,” is based on the finite-element method, or FEM, a full-wave method in high-frequency circuit analysis.

“The analysis of multilayer PCBs is really a challenge to the method, as well as other full-wave methods, because of the huge number of unknowns,” Lee said. “Therefore we developed a novel numerical technique called AMI-SSP to enhance the finite-element method so that it can be applied to deal with very large problems such as PCBs.”

While Lee said that ECE Jianming Jin, Lee’s research advisor, came up with the idea for the topic, Jin said that the paper is 100 percent Lee's work.

“As his advisor, I simply provide guidance for his research and discuss with him various aspects of the problem and the proposed solution,” Jin said.

Lee and Jin began researching in January 2007 and were able to obtain successful results by April. Lee said he prepared the paper in July for the conference.

The Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging is an annual meeting that deals with advanced and emerging issues in electrical design of interconnect structures and assurance of signal integrity. This year’s conference, which was sponsored by IEEE, was held from Oct. 28 to Oct. 31 in Atlanta. Lee and Jin presented their paper on Monday, Oct. 29, during the EM Modeling session. In addition, Lee was presented the Ansoft Corporation Award, receiving an engraved plaque.

Jin said that Lee’s work was named best student paper because of the unique methodology and the importance of the problem. “As the operation frequency increases, the electromagnetic effect becomes a critical factor in the design of high-frequency circuits,” he said. “Such an effect can only be quantified by solving Maxwell's equations, which is a very difficult computational problem and any single numerical method is found to be insufficient. To tackle this complicated problem, [he] proposed a methodology that combines several advanced numerical methods into a single simulation technique.”

Before arriving at Illinois in June 2005 to pursue his PhD, Lee earned his BSEE and MSEE from National Taiwan University in 2002 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a graduate student in the Center for Computational Electromagnetics (CCEML).

While Lee has not decided exactly where he will be after earning his degree, he said he will probably keep working on electromagnetic simulation.