37531 2 use for cover - Berkeley Engineering

ForefrontC o l l e g e o f E n g i n e e r i n g

Charting a courseWomen engineers navigate

the tides of a changing profession

University of California, Berkeley Spring 2002

FOREFRONT reports on activities inthe College of Engineering at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. It features developments of interest to the engineering and scientific communities and to alumni andfriends of the College.

Published three times a year by the Engineering Public Affairs Office102 Naval Architecture Building #1704University of CaliforniaBerkeley, CA 94720-1704

DeanA. Richard Newton

Assistant Dean for College RelationsMelissa Nidever

Public Affairs DirectorTeresa Moore

Alumni Affairs DirectorGina Rieger

EditorsJan AmbrosiniNancy Bronstein

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For Information

College of EngineeringUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeley, California 94720-1700www.coe.berkeley.edu

Engineering Public Affairs102 Naval Architecture Building #1704510/642-5857Fax: 510/643-8882

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© 2002 Regents of the University of California

Not printed at state expense.

Printed on recycled paper with soybean ink.

On the coverEven as the numbers inch up, women faculty still remain a small and relativelyisolated entity within the College. For adeeper understanding of some of theissues they’ve encountered – first asyoung girls with a passion for math andscience, later as academic engineers mov-ing toward tenure and beyond – we satdown with Fiona Doyle (on the cover),Jasmina Vujic, and Jennifer Mankoff in aforum that proved to be remarkably frankand refreshing. Their discussion clarifiessome of the unexpected challenges,nuances, and inspirations these womenfaced while charting the course of their professional lives.

For the story, see page 16.

Cover photo by Peg Skorpinski

C o l l e g e o f E n g i n e e r i n g Un i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a , B e r k e l e y S p r i n g 2 0 0 2

ForefrontFeatures8 Berkeley breathes new life into siliconNanotransistors could hold Moore’s Law at bay for decades

12 The fuel cell vehicle’s day may be dawningHydrogen-powered vehicles do more than run on clean energy, they generate electricity

14 How much stress can a poor rock stand?Berkeley engineers test how water temperature affects geothermal energy

16 Women in engineeringA faculty roundtable discussion

2 News Briefs From the dean

Prominent scientist heads new research center

Clinton slam-dunks Berkeley visit

Three-story building rides out Northridge-sized tests

Microchip seeks out prostate cancer

Technology venture helps Merced students

Will printed circuits replace barcodes on tomorrow’s soup cans?

Airplane wing design reduces wake turbulence

Revisiting shaken-baby syndrome

New dorms’ seismic foundation system passes muster

Contents

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20 Student Gazette Engineers fill Cal Band’s brassy ranks

Tradeshow features high-tech student projects

User interface solutions for disabled women

Students create “smart” inventions

22 Faculty Highlights Timely ethical issues inspire a new teaching model

Two professors elected to National Academy of Engineering

Faculty honors and awards

25 Alumni AffairsEngineering@cal launched in April

DEAA recipients feted in February

Short courses at UC Berkeley Extension

Alumni profiles

27 College SupportBequest of $3.5 million benefits graduate students

Clock is ticking for alumni challenge match

New lab wired for 21st-century education

Engineering gift report

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Prominent scientistheads CITRIS

Pioneering researcher Ruzena Bajcsy,the former head of the Directoratefor Computer and Information

Science and Engineering at the NationalScience Foundation (NSF) took thehelm of the Center for InformationTechnology Research in the Interest ofSociety (CITRIS) last November as thecenter’s new director.

CITRIS joins four UC campuses –Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and SantaCruz – with private industry to developinnovative technology that tackles someof society’s most pressing problems,such as health care, air traffic control,disaster preparedness, and energy effi-ciency. It is one of four California

Institutes for Science and Innovationestablished in the last two years byGovernor Gray Davis.

“We’re fortunate to be able to attractsomeone of Ruzena’s expertise,” saysDean A. Richard Newton. “You’ve gotto have someone who has a nationalreputation as well as management expe-rience. But the most important thing isthat she is absolutely passionate aboutwhat we’re going to do at CITRIS.”

Bajcsy helped establish NSF’sInformation Technology Research pro-gram, which funds innovative, high-impact research supporting infrastruc-ture in information technology.

A top scientist in her own right,Bajcsy has more than 40 years ofresearch experience, most notably inthe fields of robotics, artificial intelli-gence, and machine perception. At theUniversity of Pennsylvania, Bajcsyserved as director of the GeneralRobotics and Active Sensory PerceptionLaboratory (GRASP), a world-renowned research lab she founded in1978. She is a member of both theNational Academy of Engineering andthe Institute of Medicine.

But Bajcsy’s extensive professional credentials reveal only part of her story.Born Jewish in Slovakia at the timewhen Adolf Hitler rose to power, Bajcsyand one younger sister were orphanedas children, and were the sole membersof their family to survive the Nazi inva-sion. Bajcsy’s love of engineering camefrom her father, a civil engineer. Herinterest in medicine and helping otherscame from her mother, a pediatrician.And the drive to flourish in a field thatto this day is underrepresented bywomen and minorities came from herentire family.

“I grew up in a family where womenwere expected to hold their own,” shesays. “My mother and my aunt wereamong the first female medical doctors in the central Czech area. My grandfather believed womenshould be educated.”

Bajcsy received her master’s and doc-toral degrees in electrical engineeringfrom Slovak Technical University inBratislava in 1957 and 1967, respec-tively. In 1972, she earned a secondPh.D., this time in computer science,from Stanford University.

Bajcsy emerged from her trainingdetermined to make a positive impacton society. “I’m a scientist, first andabove all, but I am also a scientist withgreat social consciousness,” she says.“That is partly why I am so excitedabout CITRIS. Its aim is to investigatehow this technology I’ve been develop-ing all my life is going to benefit society.Otherwise, why are we designing allthese artifacts if they’re not going tohelp people?”

BY SARAH YANG

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In this issue of Forefront, our newly for-matted magazine now published threetimes a year, we begin a series on

Berkeley women in engineering.The series opens with a story on faculty

members in the College. In January,Forefront invited Fiona Doyle (MSE),Jennifer Mankoff (EECS), and JasminaVujic (NE) to an informal discussion at theWomen’s Faculty Club. What followedwas a lively hour of provocative insightsand anecdotes – excerpted here – high-lighting some of the obstacles and inspirations these women encountered in their careers.

We are working hard at the College torecruit more women students and faculty.In fact, four of the nine faculty we havehired since July 1, 2001, are women – ourmost productive year ever. The percent-age of women students in the College isalso at its highest recorded level. Creatinga culture of inclusion for traditionallyunderrepresented groups in engineeringis one of our top priorities.

It is my pleasure to announce the launchof the Engineering@cal online communityfor alumni and friends of the College. Oneclick to engineeralum.berkeley.edu opensthe College’s portal page, where you canregister to use e-mail forwarding, an alum-ni database, a mentoring program, andmore. Over the next few months, watchas our site and services evolve andexpand. Please take this opportunity tocontinue or renew your online relationshipwith engineering at Berkeley.

– A. Richard NewtonDean, College of Engineering

and the Roy W. Carlson Professor ofEngineering

From the Dean

News BriefsB

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F o r e f r o n t S p r i n g 2 0 0 2 | 3

Clinton slam-dunksBerkeley visit

That’s the nicest welcome ever givento a Stanford parent,” joked Bill Clinton about the standing

ovation he received after ChancellorRobert M. Berdahl presented him withthe Berkeley Medal on January 29.

More than 2,000 people filledZellerbach Hall to hear the formerpresident speak. In the Bay Area for afund-raising event, Clinton was invitedto campus by the Graduate School ofJournalism and the Chancellor’s Office,for which he waived his usual$100,000 fee.

Also attending was Governor GrayDavis, who – along with Clinton –congratulated Berkeley for its role inthe Center for Information TechnologyResearch in the Interest of Society(CITRIS) and the Bioengineering,Biotechnology and QuantitativeBiomedical Research Institute (QB3),two new UC-based centers for scienceand innovation.

Clinton spoke for a fact-filled 30minutes about globalization’s positive

and negative effects. “We’ve torn downthe walls and spread information andtechnology around the world,” he said,speaking without notes or a TelePromp-Ter. “But half the people on earth wereleft out of this expansion. One billiongo to bed hungry every night; 1.5 bil-lion never get a clean glass of water.”

Such poverty is the root of currentterrorist activity, according to Clinton.In a passage that set off waves ofapplause, he said, “I do not believe thata law enforcement and military strategyalone is enough to build a world that

we want our children to live in. I don’twant the walls we’ve torn down to besubstituted with barbed wire.” Thesolution, he continued, is to “spread thebenefits and shrink the burdens”around the world. Returning to hisStanford-parent joke, Clinton remindedthe audience that focusing on ourracial, religious, tribal, and ethnic differences, instead of our commonhumanity, would forever keep peace at bay.

After the speech Clinton sat downwith journalism dean Orville Schell fora question-and-answer session about hisview of the media and why the rightwing detests him. He seemed relaxedand articulate.

When told that an overflow audiencehad watched a video simulcast nextdoor in the Haas Pavilion, Clintonheaded over to shake hands for anotherhalf-hour. Passed a basketball to sign,he went for a 20-foot free throw, miss-ing on the first try – but sinking thesecond, to the crowd’s delighted roar.

BY BONNIE POWELL

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Former president Bill Clinton shakes hands with Berkeley students in the overflow room at Haas Pavilion.

Three-story building rides outNorthridge-sized testsA full-scale three-story woodframe apartment build-ing with tuck-under parking sustained only minor to moderate damage after Berkeley engineers put it through a series of powerful shake tests atBerkeley’s Richmond Field Station in December,observed by an enthusiastic throng of reporters,students, and researchers.

Engineers retrofitted the structure with steelframes, then subjected it to motions equivalent tothose recorded during the 1994 magnitude 6.7Northridge earthquake.

“The structural performance of the building was excellent,” says civil engineering professor and lead investigatorKhalid Mosalam. “Current seismic building codes call for these woodframe structures with tuck-under parking tobe built with steel frames, but as a retrofit, that had never been put to the test before.”

The shake test is part of a larger $6.9 million project funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agencythrough the California Office of Emergency Services. The Consortium of Universities for Research in EarthquakeEngineering (CUREE) manages the project under subcontract to the California Institute of Technology.In the Northridge quake, 24 people died as a result of damage to woodframe buildings, including 16 people in onebuilding with tuck-under parking. In addition, damage to woodframe structures caused more than $20 billion inproperty loss, exceeding the financial loss from any other single type of building construction from the quake.

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News Briefs


Microchip seeks outprostate cancer

A clever technique for detecting pro-teins by inducing them to stick toand bend a microscopic cantilever

– essentially a diving board the thick-ness of a human hair – is sensitiveenough to serve as a diagnostic test forthe protein markers characteristic ofprostate cancer, a team of scientistsfrom universities and research laborato-ries across the country reported in arecent issue of the journal NatureBiotechnology.

The protein markers, called PSAs forprostate-specific antigens, are found atelevated levels in the blood of men withprostate cancer, the number two killerof American men.

“The technique is sensitive enough todetect levels 20 times lower than theclinically relevant threshold,” saysBerkeley mechanical engineering profes-sor Arun Majumdar, a lead author ofthe report. “This is currently as good as,and potentially better than, the so-calledELISA, enzyme-linked immunosorbentassay, which is the standard today fordetecting protein markers like PSA.”

The microcantilever technique has farbroader applications, however. Any dis-ease, ranging from breast cancer toAIDS, characterized by protein in

blood or urine, could conceivably beassayed by arrays of these microcan-tilevers. A microcantilever array wouldbe one of the first “protein chips,”analogous to the DNA chip usedbroadly today in research labs and thebiotech industry to conduct hundredsof DNA analysis simultaneously.

“This could lead to fast screeningand molecular profiling for many dis-eases and a possible chip for detectingcancer,” says Majumdar.

“A big advantage of this technology isthat one could look at multiple markersin a single reaction, whereas currentlyavailable assays require a separate reac-tion for each analyte,” says colleagueRichard J. Cote, M.D., professor ofpathology and urology at the KeckSchool of Medicine of the University ofSouthern California and the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.“So the cost of performing a cantileverassay as opposed to a typical ELISAassay is potentially much, much lower.”

BY ROBERT SANDERS

Technology venture to help Merced students

Anew technology venture betweenthe Berkeley and Merced campusesis gearing up to make the content

of Berkeley’s lower-division computerscience courses available online. Thanksto this effort, UC Merced will graduateits first computer science class only twoyears after it is slated to open its doorsin 2004.

The project is being developed by the new Center for InformationTechnology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a partnership offour UC campuses – Merced, Davis,Santa Cruz, and Berkeley.

As interest in distance learning heatsup, course offerings in the computerscience division, like those of other topuniversities, increasingly have movedinto the spotlight. But until now,Berkeley instructors have held off infavor of more proven forms of teaching.

“We didn’t see how even Berkeley’sself-paced courses could just be movedover and plopped down somewhere

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else,” says Michael Clancy, senior lec-turer in computer science at Berkeley,“without the infrastructure of graduatestudents as teaching assistants, experi-enced instructors, and a program tai-lored to suit students.”

This changed with the state’s fundingof CITRIS, which will enable Berkeleyand Merced to team up and researchthe best practices in online teaching andcourse creation.

Rather than outright transfer ofcourses from one campus to another,the group has decided to create newtechnology that makes it easier todesign the right course for UC Mercedout of Berkeley’s core content. In addi-tion to the computer science content,UC Merced will receive a “course envi-ronment” with all the necessary ration-ale for course design, as well as workingalternatives to the Berkeley approach.

“The courses we’re providing are justa tip of the iceberg,” Clancy says.“What we’re really bringing to bear areyears and years of Berkeley’s experienceteaching computer science. The valueadded is the rationale behind how thecourses are constructed.”

While the future of online learning ismuch debated, most in the field agreegreat potential exists, says Berkeley edu-cation professor Marcia Linn, a partneron the project. “Online courses can offervalue added with effective use of visual-izations, explanations on demand, andinteractive problem solving,” she says.

“Our goal is a true integration ofproven classroom experiences withproven and emerging technical innova-tion,” says Jeff Wright, dean of engi-neering for UC Merced, “resulting inan overall educational framework thatprovides students more thorough, morelasting, yet personalized experiences.”

BY KATHY SCALISE

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Three cantilevers coated with antibodies to PSA, aprostate cancer marker found in the blood. The leftcantilever bends as the protein PSA binds to theantibody. Although Majumdar and his team did notconduct the current experiment with three adja-cent cantilevers, the illustration represents someof the individual experiments they performed. Thegroup currently is making a chip that can do allthree (or more) experiments simultaneously.

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Artistic rendering of the library colonnade at thefuture UC Merced campus.


Will printed circuitsreplace barcodes ontomorrow’s soup cans?

The future of the ubiquitous barcode is looking grim. In develop-ment at Berkeley are circuit-laden

smart tags printed directly on productpackaging that could revolutionizecommerce beginning with yourweekly trip to the supermarket.

Imagine filling your shoppingcart and walking right out of thestore past a sensor that automati-cally identifies what you’re buyingand instantly charges your creditcard. Of course, the store itselfwould always be fully stockedbecause the electronically-enabledshelves would take their owninventory and automaticallyreorder supplies as necessary. Yourrefrigerator might even generate itsown shopping list, sensing when yourmilk is sour or your egg carton empty.

“We’re focused on disposable elec-tronics,” says Professor VivekSubramanian of the Department ofElectrical Engineering and ComputerSciences. “The question is – can weprint a circuit on a package so thatwhen you ping it with a radio signal it’ll reply ‘hey, I’m a can of soup.’ Just as importantly, can we do it veryinexpensively?”

For these printable radio frequencyidentification (RFID) tags to catch on,they need to be dirt cheap – addingless than one-half a cent to the price ofexisting product packages, Subramaniansays. To meet that price point,Subramanian and his research grouphave embarked on a multi-disciplinaryproject spanning chemical, electrical,and mechanical engineering. Theresult is an extraordinary inkjet printerand a family of electronic inks thatenable circuits to be patterned ontopaper, plastic, or cloth without damag-ing the material.

An RFID tag consists of passive com-ponents – the inductors, capacitors andwires that handle the communication,interconnection, and power coupling;

and active components – the transistorsand diodes that handle signal modula-tion and switching.

“In the long term, you’d like to have abit of programmability,” Subramaniansays. “For example, every can of soupcould have the same identificationnumber, but each batch could be pro-grammed with a different expirationdate.”To introduce this capability, thegroup is also working on adding memoryto the tags.

At the April meeting of the MaterialsResearch Society, Subramanian’s grouppresented their success in developing aprinted conductor system that couldbe used to fabricate the RFID tags’power scavenging and communicationcircuitry. The key is “liquid gold.”Synthesized in Subramanian’s laboratory,liquid gold consists of gold nanocrys-tals that are only 10 atoms across andmelt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 timeslower than conventional gold films.The size of the gold nanocrystals isengineered to reduce the gold’s stabili-ty at elevated temperatures, to reducethe melting point.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulat-ed in an organic shell of an alkanethiol

(an organic molecule containing car-bon, hydrogen, and sulfur) and dis-solved in ink. Then, an inkjet printer –either the group’s cannibalized commer-cial model or one they have built fromscratch – deposits the material on theplastic, paper, or fabric in the desiredcircuit pattern. The liquid gold is alsosuitable for screenprinting, commonlyemployed to print product packaging.As the circuit is printed, the organicencapsulant is burned off, leaving thegold as a high-quality conductor.

“Gold is already used in semiconduc-tors, and given the amount you need inour system, the raw material cost is notvery high,” Subramanian says.

The next stage of the research is todevelop high-quality printable transis-tors, probably a year or two away,Subramanian says. One challenge, heexplains, is protecting the printed tran-sistors from corrosive oxygen and mois-ture. In collaboration with the Collegeof Chemistry, the researchers are explor-ing the use of the same polysiobutylenerubber-type material used in automo-bile tires as a screen printable packagingfor the printed transistors. In the mean-time, the researchers are working withtheir existing organic transistors, as wellas with models of what they postulatetheir future transistors will look like.

“We want to know just how good thetransistors need to be for the system towork,” he says. “After all, this project istruly at the intersection of economicsand engineering.”

BY DAVID PESCOVITZ

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Wafers such as theone Subramanian isholding are used tofabricate printed cir-cuits. Liquid gold syn-thesized inSubramanian’s lab isprinted in computer-generated patternsonto the wafer by theinkjet printer to formtransistor contacts,wires, inductors, andother componentsused in RFID circuits.

News Briefs

Wing design reduceswake turbulence

A dding triangular flaps to the designof aircraft wings dramaticallyreduces the turbulence generated

in a plane’s wake, according to Berkeleymechanical engineer Ömer Savas,whose recent research may lead toimprovements in both flight safety and airport capacity.

Wake turbulence, or wake vortices,may have played a role in the AmericanAirlines Flight 587 crash that killed 265people last November 12, according tocrash investigators. The tail fin of theAirbus A300 jet sheared off after thepilots struggled against the wake turbu-lence left by a Boeing 747 that hadtaken off less than two minutes earlier.

Savas and former graduate studentsJason Ortega and Robert Bristol havebeen experimenting with wing designsthat would quickly render wake turbu-lence harmless after takeoffs and land-ings. “The wing we designed couldmake substantial differences in flightsafety and airport capacity,” says Savas.In their bat-like design, triangular exten-sions jut out behind each wing, dissi-pating wake vortices two to three timesfaster than traditional wing designs.

Berkeley recently filed a provisionalpatent application for the design usingresults from Savas’ experiments.

Federal regulations require flights tobe spaced far enough apart during take-

off and landing to avoid the potentialhazards caused by wake turbulence.While wake turbulence alone probablycouldn’t have caused the crash of Flight587 in New York, “turbulence in com-bination with a possible structural prob-lem in the tail fin could be devastating,”says Savas.

A wake vortex results from the mis-match in speed, direction, and pressureof air moving above and below a plane’swing. These differences govern the liftgenerated during flight. Planes that arelarge, heavy, and moving slowly createstronger wake vortices.

Depending upon weather conditionsand a plane’s speed and size, the wakevortices can stretch a distance of hun-dreds of wingspans, or three to five milesfor a commercial aircraft, says Savas.

“In addition to improving safety, cut-ting the distance that the wake vortex

remains coherent would allowplanes to take off and land closerin time together without com-promising safety,” says Savas.“That leads to more efficient useof runway capacity, a major

problem at congested airports aroundthe country.”

Savas is currently working on a pilotprogram with scientists at NASA AmesResearch Center to incorporate the tri-angular-flapped wings in aircraftdesigns. He notes that commercial jetshave not gone through a significantdesign change since the Boeing 707began rolling down the runways in the1950s. “Maybe it’s time for somethingnew,” he says.

BY SARAH YANG

Revisiting shaken-baby syndrome

The 1998 Massachusetts v. Wood-ward case, or the “Nanny MurderTrial” as it was known in the

tabloids, horrified many people. ABritish au pair, Louise Woodward, wasaccused of intentionally shaking todeath the eight-month-old infant in hercare. Although the charge was reducedto involuntary manslaughter, thecase’s publicity brought shaken-babysyndrome to the top of infant abuseallegations.

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But Berkeley mechanical engineerWerner Goldsmith is trying to stoppediatricians – and prosecutors – fromjumping to the wrong conclusion. “Thepediatricians’ mantra is that subduralhematoma plus retinal hemorrhage(bleeding in the brain and behind theeye) equals child abuse. But that is notnecessarily the case,” argues Goldsmith,a much-honored professor in the gradu-ate school who has been researchinghead injuries since 1966.

“If someone intentionally abuses aninfant, the law should throw the bookat them,” he is quick to clarify. “I sim-ply want to differentiate between inten-tional abuse and accidental trauma, sothat people who experience the latteraren’t unjustly convicted.”

The problem is a total lack of biome-chanical data on infant neck and headtrauma. Goldsmith intends to correctthat by building a lifelike dummy of ababy, complete with a skull, dura (themembrane that envelopes the brain),and brain. Unlike the crash test dum-mies we see in TV ads, Goldsmith’smodel will have full range of motion inthe head, allowing him to measure themotion, deformation, and force of bothlinear and angular motion. Workingwith UC San Francisco neurosurgeonGeoffrey Manley, Goldsmith hopes toobtain actual cerebral arteries and veinsthat will allow him to model the vascu-lature of an infant’s brain exactly, per-haps even simulating blood flow.

BY BONNIE POWELL

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Werner Goldsmith displays the models he’s used over theyears to study adult head injuries.

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Top: Savas conductswind-tunnel and water-tank experiments togather data on wakevortices. Right: In tests, Savas’ wing design significantly cut wake turbulence compared withtraditional wing designs.

Testing, testing:new dorms’ seismicfoundation systempasses muster

A series of seismic tests on drilledpiers, conducted in a campusparking lot, could help existing

Berkeley structures ride out quakesmore effectively while cutting costs forconstructing earthquake-safe buildingsin the future.

The Berkeley Seismic ReviewCommittee (SRC) launched the projectlast fall as part of its continuing effortto lower the cost and improve the effectiveness of seismic design on theBerkeley campus.

Funded by Berkeley’s Capital Projects,the office that oversees campus con-struction, with participation by thePacific Earthquake Engineering Center(PEER), the tests assessed the perform-ance of drilled cast-in-place piers, not ina lab, but at an actual campus construc-tion site.

“While drilled cast-in-place piers are along-established part of constructingearthquake-safe building foundations,”says Michael Ordonia, project managerwith Capital Projects, “the twist here isthat rather than relying on scientificguesses as to the capacity of the piers,these piers were actually tested in situ tomeasure their ultimate capacity.”

Supervised by structural engineeringfirm Rutherford and Chekene, the teststook place at the Underhill Parking Loton Bowditch and College, adjacent todormitory Units 1 and 2. The teamused the parking lot, nestled betweenthe highrise dorms where over the nextfour years additional construction willtake place, to test new technology thatcould be put to use quickly, and rightnext door.

Site engineers divided the parking lotinto two test areas, drilling three holesinto the ground at each test area, thenpouring in concrete, which cured fortwo weeks. Then they ran a series ofstatic and dynamic tests on the piers.

The static tests measured the steadyforce the piers could withstand by

pulling them out of the ground over afew hours; the dynamic tests were per-formed using a relatively new dynamictest device, a Fundex Pile Load Test(PLT), recently introduced in Californiaby American Piledriving Inc. Thisdevice mimics axial seismic loading bydropping a heavy weight onto a pier fora duration of about 0.1 seconds. Testresults came as a pleasant surprise,according to PEER director Jack Moehle.“The piers were three times stronger thanwas previously thought,” he says.

Foundation piers transfer the force ofan earthquake from a building to thesoil, and do this at significant depths.But determining the size and quantityof piers necessary to safely accomplishthis transfer depends on the uniqueproperties of the soil on which a build-ing is constructed.

Unlike pre-made piers, whosestrength can be evaluated each timethey are driven into the ground, directtests of cast-in-place piers are rarebecause of the way they are constructed.“That means,” says Moehle, “that youdon’t have any direct measure of thestrength or capacity ofthe cast-in-place piers.”To compensate for this,traditional design formu-las are conservative,which often results inusing more and largerdiameter piers than arenecessary.

“The dynamic natureof the PLT tests willallow us to use better val-ues for seismic design offoundation elements onthe Berkeley campus and,hopefully, we can alsoinfluence future design totake better advantage ofthe good dynamicresponse of foundationelements,” says civil engi-neering professor NickSitar, outgoing SRCchair. “Also, the PLT testis relatively simple andquick, which means weshould be able to use iton a more routine basison future projects.”

The project will create significant sav-ings for the University, Ordonia says.Capital Projects staff estimate that afterspending roughly $100,000 to conductthe tests, the campus will garner a netsavings of up to $400,000 in reducedconstruction costs. Test results havealready been incorporated into the resi-dential hall building project adjacent tothe test site. And because the soilsunder the campus are fairly uniform,the research could be used for upcom-ing construction projects as well, saysOrdonia.

Test data will also help retrofit exist-ing buildings. “If there’s some structuralelement that has to be rebuilt as part ofthe building, now we have an addition-al tool with which to analyze the struc-tural system,” says Ordonia. “What’smore, the project offered a uniqueopportunity for architects, structuralengineers, geotechnical engineers, earthquake engineers, and Universityadministrators to work together using performance-based engineeringtechniques.”

BY JESSICA M. SCULLY

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Berkeley architects, engineers, and administrators teamed up last fall to testthe seismic strength of foundation piers at a campus construction site. Usingan innovative dynamic testing device, above, engineers collected and analyzeddata that will lead to more effective retrofitting and lower construction costs.

Wafers such as these that Tsu-JaeKing, left, and doctoral student Yang-Kyu Choi are inspecting, have justcome out of the “stepper,” (out ofview) the lab’s new state-of-the-artlithography equipment used to printfine features on the surface of thewafer. Once imprinted, the wafers areinspected and loaded up for etching.“Yang-Kyu has made some of theworld’s smallest transistors,” Kingpoints out. “Now we want to provethey can work in the circuit. What wewant is circuit performance.”


First proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, aBerkeley chemistry alum who went on toco-found Intel, Moore’s Law has provenitself with a steady increase in computingpower at proportionate decreases in cost. Ata certain scale though, today’s transistors –the tiny on/off switches that make up inte-grated circuits – will become too unreliableand, perhaps even sooner, too expensive tobe practical. The private sector expectsthat day to come within a decade or so.But a trio of Berkeley researchers designingthe world’s smallest next-generation transistors aren’t quite ready to putMoore’s Law to rest.

“We think we can keep shrinking thetransistor for another 20 years,” saysChenming Hu of the Department ofElectrical Engineering and ComputerSciences who, with faculty colleagues JeffBokor and Tsu-Jae King and a team ofgraduate students, created new devices thatenhance performance while also enablingchips to keep shrinking. “Even if the brickwall faced by Moore’s Law can’t be toppled,it certainly could be pushed further out,”says Hu.

To extend the life of Moore’s Law in thelong-term, and improve computing powerin the short-term, the Berkeley researchersare proposing two new paradigms in silicontransistor design: FinFET (Fin Field Effect

Transistor) and UTB (Ultra-Thin Body).Ten times smaller than today’s transistors,the FinFET and UTB devices measure lessthan 100 atoms across. Their Lilliputianscale means that a trillion transistors couldbe packed on a chip that today holds a mere one billion. That increase in processingpower could lead to ultra-fast and hyper-realistic medical simulations, handheld foreign language translators that work in real time, and computers that respond tonatural spoken language.

While these applications are at least adozen years away, the FinFET and UTBresearch is already bearing fruit. Mostrecently, the Berkeley researchers presentedtheir progress in performance and manufac-turing processes at the 2001 InternationalElectron Devices Meeting (IEDM) inDecember. But Hu, Bokor, and King’s crew were not the only ones trumpetingadvances in transistor technology born, orat least furthered, at Cal. For starters, anIBM research group, led by a former stu-dent of Bokor’s, presented their own positive FinFET findings.

“IBM was already working on this tech-nology when they got one of our Berkeleyexperts to go there,” Bokor says of his for-mer student. “He sort of supercharged theirproject, and we’re all very proud of that.”

Also at IEDM, Intel Corporation touted

The future of computing is headed toward a brick wall.

Eventually, the silicon industry’s rule of thumb known as

Moore’s Law – which predicts that the number of transistors

that can be packed on a silicon integrated circuit doubles every 18

months – will be vetoed by the laws of physics and economics.

Berkeley breathes new life into silicon

Nanotransistors could

hold Moore’s Law at

bay for decades

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their newly announced TeraHertz transistor,essentially a structural double of Berkeley’sUTB transistor. The company expects toadd elements of the TeraHertz technologyinto its product line as early as 2005.

“These various companies have our for-mer students, so they have the benefit ofknowing the issues with laying out anddesigning these circuits,” King says. “Iwould think they have a good chance atbeing very successful.”

The FinFET and UTB project was bornin 1996 out of a Defense Advanced Re-search Projects Agency (DARPA) call forresearchers to fabricate a transistor that was25 nanometers in length. (A nanometer isone-billionth of a meter.) At the time, thesmallest transistors were 250 nanometers inlength. A cloud of uncertainty hovered over thesilicon industry as researchers expressed concernthat the future of silicon transistors, especiallypast the 50-nanometer size, was grim.

“The expectation then was that DARPA’ssize requirement could only be met by exot-ic approaches like quantum devices that arenot compatible with circuits for real applica-tions,” Hu says. “But we submitted a pro-posal to do it with silicon, which isBerkeley’s specialty. We believed in thefuture of silicon when most people weredoubting it.”

In 1999, the Berkeley team dropped their 18-nanometer transistor design inDARPA’s lap, christened as FinFET. In2000, DARPA honored the group’s successwith the prestigious Award for TechnicalAchievement. Currently, the project is funded under Microelectronics AdvancedResearch Corporation and SemiconductorResearch Corporation grants.

To understand how Berkeley broke theworld record in silicon scaling, a bit of tran-sistor terminology is necessary. Comple-mentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)is the technology commonly used to fabri-cate transistors. Semiconductors are exactlywhat the name implies. The crystallinematerials, including silicon and germanium,aren’t as good as, say, copper wire in allow-ing electrons to flow through. But they’re

not that bad at it either. Also, impuritiessuch as boron can be added to the semicon-ductor to selectively enhance its conductivi-ty. This process, called “doping,” results in asemiconductor with either an abundance ofmobile positive charge (a “p-type” material)or an abundance of mobile negative charge(an “n-type” material).

The transistor itself contains three termi-nals: the source, the gate, and the drain. Inthe most common transistor type, thesource and the drain, doped n-type, residein a p-type body. The conductivity of the p-type region between the source and drainis controlled by the gate, which is located

Hu, Bokor, and King (pictured count-er-clockwise from top) inspectwafers, which are fabricated in theMicroLab, then measured here, inthe Device Characterization Lab inCory Hall.

“We think we can keep shrinking the transistor for another 20 years.”

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directly above thechannel with a thininterposing oxidelayer. This layer isneeded to preventelectrical currentfrom flowingbetween the gate andthe channel. The sizeof a transistor actual-ly refers to thelength of the gate,which correspondsto the spacingbetween the sourceand the drain.Applying a positivevoltage to the gateattracts the negative-ly charged electronsfrom the source intoa surface channel,creating a continu-ous n-type layer forcurrent to flowbetween the source

and drain. At this point, the transistor is“on.” If the voltage at the gate is removed,the n-type channel layer cannot be main-tained, switching the transistor “off.”

The problem is that as the gate length isshrunk and the source and drain are pushedso close together (less than 100 atomsapart), more electrons can sneak throughduring the “off” state.

“There’s no such thing as zero in engineer-ing, but the goal is to make the current asminimal as possible” when the transistor isoff, Bokor says. “When chips have hundredsof millions of transistors, even a tinyamount of leakage per transistor adds up.”

In the FinFET design, a thin vertical sili-con “fin” is built between the source anddrain. Then the gate electrode material isdeposited on both sides of the fin resultingin a double gate structure, one on each sideof the channel.

“It’s like trying to stop a bleeding vein,”

Hu says. “You could press down on thevein, but it would be much more effective ifyou could get another finger behind thevein and pinch it closed.”

At IEDM 1999, the group presented agroundbreaking paper demonstrating thatthe FinFET design successfully blocked cur-rent in the “off state,” even on such a smallscale. Last year’s encore showed that theFinFET conducts enough current in the“on” state to deliver on its promised highperformance.

“In industry, they have large fabricationfacilities and lots of engineers to work onoptimizing devices,” Bokor says. “It’s obvi-ously harder for us. So it took a while, butwe did it.”

Hu, Bokor, and King’s second transistordesign, the Ultra-Thin Body device, em-ploys a very different engineering innovationto shorten gate lengths while preventingleakage. In today’s transistors, most of theleakage occurs deep in the body of the tran-sistor below the gate. The UTB approachis to eliminate that material except for thetop-most portion of the channel that iswell-controlled by the gate.

“To continue the bleeding analogy, theUTB approach is like closing off a vein bypushing it against a hard surface like abone,” Hu says. “It’s an improvement, butpinching it like the FinFET does is still thebest way.”

Once the FinFET and UTB structureswere designed, King and Bokor, along withelectrical engineering colleague VivekSubramanian, faced another set of chal-lenges inside the clean room where the tran-sistors are manufactured.

“No one else had really tried to thin downsilicon this much in a controllable mannerand make transistors,” says King, the facultydirector of Berkeley’s MicrofabricationLaboratory. “We had to find ways to evendefine the features so we could make thesetransistors.”

For example, in the case of the UTBapproach it’s desirable to make the silicon

MicroLab researchers such as Bokorand King (the lab’s director) suit upfrom head to toe in “clean suits” (theycall them bunny suits) to prevent eventhe smallest amount of contaminationfrom entering the lab or its extremelysensitive equipment. The lab has morethan 300 active users, includingresearchers from nine departments oncampus and users in private industry.

“We believed in the future of silicon when most people were doubting it.”

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body below the gate as thin as possible tohelp control leakage. But this isn’t the caseon either side of the gate. There, the materi-al should be as conductive as possible to prevent a bottleneck in the flow of electricity.Their novel solution, King explains, was to selectively thicken the areas around the gate by depositing materials only inthose regions.

While King oversees the integration of theentire manufacturing process, Bokor focuseson one critical element: lithography. Layersof material in today’s chips are patternedusing a process where light shining througha mask (essentially a stencil of a chip’s fea-tures) projects the circuit pattern onto a sili-con wafer coated with photoresist, an organ-ic film that hardens when exposed to light.The shorter the wavelength of light project-ing through the mask,the smaller the featureson the chip. In order tomake transistors withfeatures as small as theFinFET and UTB de-vices, Bokor employedan electron beam,exposing the maskpattern on the siliconwafer. Fortunately,the best electron beamfacility in the world forthis type of work isadjacent to the Berkeleycampus at LawrenceBerkeley NationalLaboratory (LBNL).Since 1996, Bokor hascollaborated with ErikAnderson, director ofLBNL’s Center forX-ray Optics, anddirector of LBNL’s“Nanowriter” facility.

“This is a laboratory technique though,and not suited for mass production,”Bokor says. “A whole other issue in thisproject is how to mass produce transistorson this size-scale.”

One part of the answer may lie in Bokor’spioneering research into extreme ultravioletlithography (EUV), the industry’s leading

candidate for next-generation lithography. Itis expected that EUV will enable the fabrica-tion of chips with 20-nanometer transistorsand smaller, breaking down some of themass manufacturing barriers threateningMoore’s Law.

“The brick wall is now at 10 nanome-ters and we’re reaching out to touch it,”Bokor says.

With the end of silicon in sight, theBerkeley research into FinFET and UTBstructures is cranking along with an empha-sis on honing the production process formass manufacture. Indeed, King says, it’s adetail-oriented job.

“On this scale if you have one less atom ina channel, that can affect the performance,”she says. “And we want to see how thesetransistor structures perform at the ultimate

size limits.”While computers can

simulate the operationof transistors, Kingbelieves that the onlyway to truly test noveldevices is to makethem. Then the simula-tion models can beupdated with real-worlddata, and circuits usingthe FinFET and UTBtransistors can be accu-rately designed.

Once the advantagesare on the table and themanufacturing kinksironed out, it’s up to theprivate sector to takethe ball and run with it.

“The brick wall facingtoday’s transistors is stilla ways off,” Hu says.“The industry can con-tinue for a while. But at

what point would a company become morecompetitive to convert to our new structure?Our challenge is to make that switch morecompelling.”

Wr i t t e n b y D a v i d Pe s c o v i t z , a c o n t r i b u t i n g w r i t e rt o Wi r e d a n d c r e a t o r o f L a b N o t e s ( w w w. c o e . b e r k e -l e y. e d u / l a b n o t e s ) , t h e C o l l e g e ’ s o n l i n e r e s e a r c hd i g e s t . H i s w o r k h a s a p p e a r e d i n S c i e n t i f i c A m e r i c a n ,N e w S c i e n t i s t , t h e N e w Yo r k T i m e s , a n d S a l o n .

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A trillion transistors couldbe packed on achip that todayholds a mere onebillion.

Probe stations, such as this one in the DeviceCharacterization Lab, measure devices as small as asingle transistor.

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The fuel cell vehicle’s

But solutions to America’s thirst for speed,power, and electrical gadgetry have been elu-sive. Electric cars are often a big draw atauto shows, but such vehicles are stillextremely scarce on the roadways. Electricityproduced by wind and solar energy has,until recently, been more expensive thanthat produced by fossil fuel-powered plants.And while conservation has reduced our oiluse significantly – especially in California –there are limits to how much Americans cankeep the lights low, the appliances off, andtheir cars at home.

For many, this has looked like an unsolv-able mess. But for Daniel Kammen,Berkeley professor of nuclear engineering,energy and resources, and public policy, thesolution is simple: develop cars that not onlyrun on “clean energy,” but also generate“clean electricity.” “And,” says Kammen,“develop and promote them now.”

Kammen, who directs the Renewable andAppropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), hasbeen analyzing the benefits of such cars foryears – one aspect of his ongoing work onthe environmental, health, and economicimpacts of energy use in industrializednations and third world countries.

He and several colleagues released a paperlast year showing that fuel cell vehicles

(FCVs) – cars that generate electricity fromfuel cells – can serve a dual role: poweringyour car as well as supplying electricity atcompetitive rates, especially in office build-ings. “We surprised ourselves by the results,”says Kammen with a grin. “We didn’t realizethe potential would be so great.”

The idea of using fuel cells, which convertthe energy in a fuel like hydrogen and oxy-gen into electricity, is not new. Back in1839, Sir William Grove, an English scien-tist, discovered that by combining hydrogenand oxygen, he could produce water andelectricity. Years later, in the 1950s, FrancisBacon used Grove’s earlier discovery todevelop a hydrogen-powered fuel cell thatcould power a vehicle. Then during the1960s, Pratt & Whitney went a step further,and developed fuel cells to create electricityfor the Apollo space missions.

“After that, some power companiesexpressed interest in using stacks of fuel cellsto generate electricity,” Kammen says, “butit was too costly. Now we’re finding the realcost-effectiveness lies in having people gen-erate their own electricity with their ownfuel cells.”

Fuel cells could provide a transition fromfossil fuels to renewable sources of energy,according to Kammen, who has explored

day may be dawningFor years, advocates of alternative energy have decried using oil

to fuel our power plants and vehicles. Drilling for oil creates

environmental havoc, critics charge. Burning oil produces nox-

ious air emissions and contributes to global warming, they continue.

Besides, our oil-guzzling ways make us dangerously dependent on

foreign oil and the foreign powers that control it.

Hydrogen-powered

vehicles do more than

run on clean energy, they

generate electricity

High-efficiency solar panels, such as these, could be used to produce hydrogen to power a fuel cell vehicle.

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the intersection of energy use and societysince his graduate school days. Fuel cells usean electrochemical reaction to produce elec-tricity, rather than moving parts, so the cellsare quiet. And since there is no combustion,they generate no air pollution or greenhousegases. And because fuel cells are so thin – asthin as a piece of paper – they can bestacked together to produce a lot of electrici-ty within a small space. That stackability –or “scaleability” – means fuel-cell vehicleswill have the get up and go that electric carscurrently lack.

You can also produce extra electricity fromthem. Rather than thinking of fuel cells inthe traditional model of energy production– in which a utility generates electricityfrom a centralized location, then transmits itto millions of consumers – Kammen envi-sions consumers using their FCVs to gener-ate electricity for local neighborhoods andbusinesses right from their own garages.

Here’s how it works. At the end of theday, you drive your FCV home from theoffice. The fuel cell you’d be using would,most likely, run on hydrogen, derived, atleast initially, from natural gas supplied byfilling stations. Once inside the garage, youplug your car into an electrical outlet – noordinary electrical outlet, but one that sendselectricity into the grid, rather than pullingit out of the grid. Then the fuel cells begingenerating electricity.

Using FCVs to generate electricity for justone home is not all that efficient, Kammenconcedes. But an FCV could easily generateenough electricity to light up several homes,even an office building. To do that, driverswould motor to work in their FCV, park ina fuel cell plug-in station, and pump elec-tricity into the company’s building.

It appears to be a clean, efficient solution.And, says Kammen, it’s a solution thatcould put money back into consumers’pockets, if FCV consumers are reimbursedfor their electricity, either by their utilitycompany or their employer. In one back-of-the-envelope calculation, he predicted con-sumers could earn between $200 and$1,000 a year, rather than paying $500 to$1,200 in annual utility fees.

Equally important, such “distributed gen-eration” (rather than centralized power pro-duction from a power plant) could “radicallytransform the way we see and use electrici-ty,” Kammen says. “If production is closerto where the electricity is used, we’ll wasteless electricity during transmission. What’smore, we can avoid building new power

plants and vastly increase the security andreliability of our electricity system.”

Kammen knows that moving toward aworld where energy production relies nei-ther on internal combustion engines norcentralized power production is a Herculeanundertaking – one that involves movingmountains in the form of car companiesand government agencies, not to mentionconsumers. California, Kammen notes, maybe the ideal place to start. The ZeroEmissions Requirement of 1994 has madethe need for clean-running cars mandatory;and the state-wide energy crisis of 2001raised consumer awareness to new levels.

“Instead of revamping an inefficient, anti-quated grid that relies on 1940s technolo-gies, we should replace it with distributedgeneration,” Kammen says. “And it doesn’thave to be done overnight. We can updatethe system neighborhood by neighborhood,but only if the utilities or other startup com-panies are afforded the market opportunity.”

Just how soon FCVs could be on the mar-ket is unclear. Several car companies say theywill release FCVs in the next few years. Andearlier this year the Bush administrationannounced it would back the developmentof “clean” vehicles powered by fuel cells. Itcould be, says Kammen, that we will seeFCVs on the road by the end of next year.

Wr i t t e n b y S u s a n D a v i s , w h o s e f a t h e r h e l p e d d e s i g nt h e A p o l l o f u e l c e l l s . A B a y A r e a w r i t e r a n d e d i t o r,D a v i s h a s w r i t t e n o n e n v i r o n m e n t a l i s s u e s f o r I n t e lC o r p o r a t i o n , L a w r e n c e B e r k e l e y N a t i o n a l L a b o r a t o r y,a n d T h e N a t u r e C o n s e r v a n c y. S h e c o - a u t h o r e d TheSport ing L i fe , a b o o k o n t h e p h y s i c s o f s p o r t s , a s w e l la s s e v e r a l b o o k s o n p l a y i n g w i t h c h i l d r e n , a n d h a s c o n -t r i b u t e d t o Sports I l lus t rated , Parent ing , a n d Lad iesHome Journa l .

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Consumers’ fuelcell vehicles couldgenerate electricityfor local businessesright from theirown garages.

Kammen wires up a solar panel, adjustingthe device that measures how much sun-light the panel absorbs; all this in the tree-tops of his Barrows Hall roof lab.

In the heart of Sonoma County’s lush wine country, just 34 miles

northeast of San Francisco, engineers have tunneled under

the Russian River to carry treated wastewater from the city of

Santa Rosa to the Geysers geothermal fields — the largest producer

of geothermal energy in the world.

Steam-driven turbines at the Geysers pro-duce enough electricity to meet the dailyneeds of some one million people through-out the state of California. But, for the past15 years, the amount of steam available tofuel the geothermal plants has been decreas-ing, as the reservoir beneath the Geysersdries up, a victim of overpumping. As aresult, energy production has slipped and isin danger of grinding to a halt.

In search of solutions, plant operators atthe Geysers, in partnership with the LakeCounty Sanitation District, came up withan innovative plan to restore and maintainadequate levels of underground water toensure continued energy production. Theydecided to inject tertiary-treated wastewater,which is completely safe to drink, from theLake County communities surroundingClear Lake into the ground at the Geysers –30 miles to the south – to replenish theunderground reservoirs.

For the past four years, some 7.8 milliongallons of water each day have been injectedat the Geysers. With the addition of theSanta Rosa wastewater project, expected tobe completed this year, an additional 11million gallons of water will be added eachday. But while all the operational details toreplenish the water reserves seemed in place,according to Steven Glaser, Berkeley profes-sor of civil and environmental engineering,

one crucial element had been overlooked. “I was shocked when a colleague told me

that nobody really knew what happenedwhen cooler water, like the injected waste-water, hit very hot rocks,” says Glaser. “Willthe fracturing of the hot rock that inevitablyresults from the cold water injection disruptor block the movement of steam or increaseit?” he wondered. “Despite years of waterinjection in geothermal fields like theGeysers, no one knows. Certainly, you don’twant to damage your reservoir.”

So, Glaser assembled a research team,secured funding from the U.S. Departmentof Energy and Shell InternationalExploration and Production Co. (they areinterested in drilling under high tempera-tures), designed new lab equipment, andbegan a series of controlled laboratory exper-iments testing rocks similar to those foundin the Geysers.

Working with graduate student JeffMoore, Glaser assembled a unique testingdevice now located along one wall of hisrock mechanics lab. Inside the testingdevice, flat bladders filled with pressurizedoil squeeze a rock sample up to 1,500pounds per square inch (psi), matching pres-sures found deep underground. Glaser andMoore saturate the pressurized, heated sam-ple with steam, up to 300 psi, pumping thetemperatures up to more than 200 degrees

How much stressBerkeley engineers

test how water

temperature affects

geothermal energy

can a poor rock stand?

It takes about three hours to heat up Glaser’s pressure chamber.Gauges control the temperature and pressure for the water injectionsystem used to put the rock samplesthrough their thermal paces.

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Celsius – almost 400 degrees Fahrenheit.Finally, they inject water at room tempera-ture to a well-point drilled into the rock.Then they wait, and watch.

Glaser and his colleague Frank Morrison,professor of civil and environmental engi-neering, monitor the movement of the cool-er water through the hot rock, recording anyfracturing. Sensitive acoustic sensors arrayedaround the rock sample inside the heaterdetect the telltale sounds that indicate frac-ture has occurred. “Every time rock cracks,”says Glaser, “it generates sound waves, littlesnaps, crackles, and pops.”

“The sensors, as they stand right now,”Glaser adds, “are not going to like 200degrees Celsius. We have to find differentmaterials, with higher heat resistance, out ofwhich to make them.” Using a techniquethat triangulates signals from multiple sen-sors, the engineers should be able to create athree-dimensional map of the inside of therock, showing the placement and size ofnew fractures.

But it’s not enough to know where newfractures occur. Glaser andMorrison want to know how thecold water flows through andinteracts with the hot steamalready in the rock. To that end,the team will measure changesin the rock sample’s ability totransmit electrical currents, orits resistivity, as the cold watermoves through the heated rocksample. “Minerals in rock actlike insulators,” Morrisonexplains. “Current in rock flows throughany water inside it.” Resistivity increaseswhen rock is cold, and decreases when it ishot, since cold water is less likely to conducta current. Thus changes in resistivity shouldindicate where areas of cool water and hotsteam are as they flow through the rock.“I’ve measured resistivity on blocks of rocksbefore,” Morrison adds, “but not under con-ditions of such high temperatures and pres-sures, or with injected water.”

These conditions, which match thoseoccurring deep underneath the Geysers, as well as the substantial size of the rock samples used (10.25 inches on a side) distin-guish Glaser’s experiment from other rock tests. “Usually test rock samples areabout the size of your thumb,” he says. “AtStanford, for example, they do tests onthumb-sized rock samples that they can heatto 105 degrees Celsius. Our experiment will

run more than twice as hot.

“Once the experi-ment is up and run-ning this spring, it willhelp heat the notori-ously chilly lab in theDavis Hall annex,”jokes Glaser, addingthat he is concernedfuture testing could bejeopardized because ofthe pending annexdemolition.

Preliminary tests willbe done on a sampleof Berea sandstone, awell-understood rockoften used in petrole-um testing. Then, asthe real testing begins,the team will collectrock samples at theGeysers. “You consulta geologic map, drill some cores, and find

out where on the surfacethere are outcroppings ofrock similar to what’s in thesteam-producing zone under-ground,” says Moore.

Glaser’s one-of-a-kindtesting device will alsostudy fracturing in hot dryrocks as well as those filledwith steam. Engineers inJapan and Europe regularlyinject water into the hot

dry rocks deep in geothermal areas there,hoping to generate steam to produce electricity. But, as with the Geysers, moretesting must be done under realistic conditions. Glaser’s device also mimicsconditions encountered during petroleumdrilling, and tests what happens whenengineers inject steam to clean up pollutedunderground sites.

The results of Glaser’s and Morrison’s testswill become even more important onceSanta Rosa’s wastewater begins flowing.Knowing what’s really happening under-ground as the chilly water hits hot rocksfilled with steam will enable geothermalplant operators around the world to contin-ue to generate desperately needed electricityfor years to come.

Written by Sally Stephens, a freelance astronomy writerbased in San Francisco. Formerly a staff scientist and editorof Mercury, she co-authored T h e Sporting Life, a book on thephysics of sports.

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Before firing up their 4,000-pound pressure chamber, Steve Glaser, left, and Jeff Moore prepare to hoist thedevice some five feet into the air, whereit will dangle as it is carefully wrappedin an insulating blanket, allowingresearchers in the rock mechanics labto work around it safely.

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”Nobody really

knows what happens

when cooler water,

like the injected

wastewater, hits very

hot rocks.”

In an era when women are comfortably positioned on the Supreme Court,

hold seats in the Senate, and take leadership roles in corporate board rooms,

it may come as a surprise that women comprise just nine percent of

Berkeley’s august engineering faculty. Undergraduate women’s presence in engi-

neering is, not unexpectedly, somewhat higher at 23.5 percent, a number that

has not changed significantly for the past five years.

Tallies tracking women in engineering began in 1876, when Elizabeth Bragg

became the first woman to earn an engineering degree. It took just shy of 100

years from Bragg’s graduation, however, for a woman to be invited into the

College’s faculty ranks. Computer science professor Susan Graham bears that

distinction. Of 54 academic appointments in the College, from 1995 to 2000,

four were women. But since July 2001, four of the nine faculty hired in the

College have been women.

For the most part, Berkeley’s statistics mirror the national numbers. In 1998,

women made up about 20 percent of all undergraduate engineers across the

nation, up from 12 percent in 1979, according to the Society of Women Engineers.

While the numbers of women engineers on both sides of the academic chalkboard

are slowly rising at Berkeley and elsewhere, women remain a relatively small, and

sometimes isolated, entity with the College.

The numbers tell a story all their own, but the full picture is best revealed by the

women faculty themselves. Fiona Doyle, Jasmina Vujic, and Jennifer Mankoff

shared their experiences in a lively roundtable discussion last January at the

Women’s Faculty Club. Excerpts from their discussion follow.

Women in engineering:a faculty roundtable discussion

The first in a series

exploring women’s

issues at the College

and beyond


Professor Fiona Doyle, the DonaldH. McLaughlin Professor ofMineral Engineering, an expert on

solution processing of materials andmetallic contaminants in water andsoils, joined the materials science andengineering department in 1983. She teaches courses in the surfaceproperties and aqueous processing ofmaterials. “I always thought scienceand math were so easy and so interest-ing that I couldn’t understand whyanybody would want to do anythingelse,” says British native Doyle, 45,who has two young children withwhom she is forever doing chemicalexperiments in her kitchen, as she puts it.

Nuclear engineering associate profes-sor Jasmina Vujic, 48, was the firstwoman to join the nuclear engineeringfaculty in 1992. “I decided to pursuenuclear engineering because peoplesaid it was the most difficult field,”says Vujic, whose daughter, Nevena, is a senior in Berkeley’s civil and envi-ronmental engineering department.A Yugoslav native, Vujic came toAmerica to pursue her doctoral studiesand decided to stay when her nativecountry began disintegrating. Herresearch includes the development ofincreasingly advanced computational

tools to designand analyzenuclear reactors,and other radio-logical devices todetect and treataggressive tumors.

Assistant profes-sor JenniferMankoff, one ofthe College’s newhires, joined thecomputer sciencesfaculty last fall.Now 28, Mankoffbegan her collegecareer at Oberlin as a double degreestudent in liberal arts and viola performance, before focusing solely on computer science. While a studentat Georgia Tech, she played viola withthe Emory-Atlanta symphony, andnow plays viola in Berkeley’sUniversity Orchestra. Also an accom-plished painter, Mankoff is recoveringfrom a severe case of repetitive straininjury, a disability that in part drivesher current research in special-needscomputing and assistive technology.

Q:Let’s talk about some of the chal-lenges you faced, first as young

girls with an interest in mathand science, and later as pro-fessional engineers.

DOYLE: I went to a highschool where we weretaught needlework, notmetal work or engineeringdrawings. But I was luckyin that as an undergradu-ate in the sciences, Iattended a women’s collegeat Cambridge University

where there was a lot of support. I went to graduate school at theUniversity of London’s ImperialCollege, where I was the first womanthey’d ever had in the extractive metal-lurgy program, and they regarded me assomething of a curiosity, but were quitegentlemanly about it. Here, I’ve beenthe only woman on the faculty in mydepartment for the past 18 years andI’ve definitely felt some marginalization.

VUJIC: In Yugoslavia, where I grew up,young girls were encouraged to studyand pursue hard fields like engineeringand they weren’t afraid of math orphysics. Although there were only afew women in the department of elec-trical engineering, we had a lot ofrespect from our colleagues because wewere excellent students. The problemsarose when I came to do my doctorateat the University of Michigan. I had ayoung child, so I was stretched amongmany different obligations and daycarewas nonexistent. In my country thegovernment runs our daycare centers.But here, it was very difficult, and


Jennifer Mankoff (in background) and Fiona Doyle

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“We have to change the perspectiveat the elementary and high school

levels and encourage girls to takemath and physics.”

Jasmina Vujic

sometimes you are treated as if youdon’t have family obligations, and youare stretched, particularly during yourpre-tenure years.

DOYLE: It’s something that’s problemat-ic for young men too. The perceptionamong some senior faculty is that if oneis taking care of one’s family, one is notserious about one’s job.

MANKOFF: Everywhere I interviewed, I asked whether anyone had had a childbefore tenure. What kind of supportwas there within the department forpeople having kids? Was there a parents’

room? There are young men in thedepartment with young children, butI’m the only woman who is pre-tenureright now, so we’ll see what happens.But going back to the original ques-tion, I’ve spent a lot of time being theonly woman interested in math or theonly woman in the computer sciencesdepartment. But so far, people havesupported me on women’s issues. Ithink things are a little different formy generation.

Q: How has the career landscapeevolved for women engineersin academia over the years?

DOYLE: When I first camehere – back in the dawn ofhistory – there were onlythree women professors inthe College of Engineering.Women seemed to beregarded as a curiosity, andthere was a lot of skepti-cism as to whether or notwomen could really doengineering. Now I havesuch amazingly goodfemale colleagues that thereis no question at all aboutthe excellence of women inengineering. In my mind,there are enough datapoints, that it is generallyacknowledged that thewomen work harder thanthe men.

VUJIC: I agree, because inorder to become a facultymember, particularly forwomen in engineering,you have to really do agood job.

MANKOFF: One thing to remember isthat although women are choosing tocontinue having careers, they still havedifferent career paths than men. In gen-eral, they will stop to have a familysometimes, or even if they don’t stop,their family has an impact. A lot ofwomen will go into industry first, thenmaybe come back to academia. So evenif you increase the numbers throughgraduate school, there’s such a diversity ofways that women move professionally atthat stage, that it has a big impact onwhat happens to the numbers.

Q:So, it would seem that there’s moreto be done. What are your thoughts

about remedying the gender gap in engi-neering?

DOYLE: Last year the College looked atthe issue of women on the faculty andone of the committee members inter-viewed women who either didn’t get thefaculty positions for which they inter-viewed, or chose not to come. Quite afew commented that they felt thatBerkeley was less supportive of itswomen faculty than some of our com-peting institutions. So you know, we dohave data that we don’t seem to be keep-ing up with some of our competitors.

VUJIC: There are several organizationshelping with outreach, but theUniversity should do much more. Wehave to change the perspective at theelementary and high school levels andencourage girls to take math andphysics. Girls are still led to believe thatthese subjects are scary and that theycan’t do as well as boys.

MANKOFF: I think that mentoring isextremely important. It’s been a con-stant in my life by other students


Jennifer Mankoff

“Although women are choosing to have careers,they still have different career paths than men.”

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and faculty, as well as an importantpart of what I’ve done for others. But,I had someone ask me recently: ifwe’re trying to make changes, whendo we stop trying? If it’s 30 percentfemale faculty, have we gone farenough? What about 50 percent? Or 70 percent?DOYLE: When we stop asking the ques-tions, we’re there. I suspect that if onecan get to a state where all the biaseshave been removed, we would end upwith a situation where there are fewerthan 50 percent women in engineering.From my statistically unrepresentativeobservation of boys and girls, I see dif-ferent behaviors and interests. I suspectthere wouldn’t be enough womeninterested in engineering to equate thegenders exactly.

Q:Well, that leads me to ask whetheryou see inherent differences

between how boys and girls think andsolve problems. If so, how does this affectthe gender equation ultimately?

DOYLE: I tend to see a lot more cre-ativity in women students. It’s alwaysdifficult to generalize, because thereare some enormously creative men aswell as many women who aren’t cre-ative. But I suspect that there wouldbe more “out of the box” thinkingabout problems that could lead tosome fairly revolutionary changes inthe way things are done. But despiteeverything I just said about creativity,engineering has to be quantitative.Not only does one have to come upwith bright ideas, they have to be rig-orous, practical ideas that can work.And I suspect that fewer girls areinterested in that very quantitative


way of viewing the worldthan boys.

VUJIC: I don’t think there areinborn differences. I think it’ssimply how you start to learnfrom an early age, how yourfamily passes on the values.

MANKOFF: I agree. It’s interest-ing to think back on the factthat centuries ago music andmath were the same field.And you would think of oneas creative, and the other asanalytical, right?

VUJIC: And they go together.

Q:How would the field ofengineering be different if

the ratio of women to men werereversed?

DOYLE: The first thing thatcrosses my mind is that socie-ty would have a much loweropinion of engineering as a pro-fession and the salaries would be sig-nificantly lower. My sister is a physi-cian in Britain, and when she went tomedical school, medicine was a male-dominated profession and very presti-gious, with high salary levels. Now,close to 30 years later, the gender dif-ference is reversed, and she tells methat the salary levels are going waydown because society does not valuephysicians the way it used to.

MANKOFF: That’s a good point, becausewhen a career becomes popular you seethese switches. It’s called “feminizationof a field,” and it’s happened multipletimes in different careers.

VUJIC: Also, because women are lessaggressive, if they were dominating thefield there would be less research tocreate anything destructive. Therewould undoubtedly be more emphasison innovations to help ease our lives.

DOYLE: Women tend to question someof the assumptions that are part ofeveryday problem solving. We tend tostep back and ask if there’s anotherway to do this. Generally, great inven-tions result from people thinkingunconventionally.Marguerite Rigoglioso moderated the roundtable dis-cussion and helped edit the transcript of comments. Aformer associate editor of the Harvard BusinessSchool’s alumni magazine, she is a Bay Area freelancerwho writes on women’s issues, the environment, andtechnology.

Fiona Doyle

“Women tend to question some of the assumptions that arepart of everyday problem solving ... and think ‘out of the box.’”


Engineers fill CalBand’s brassy ranks

The College of Engineering is hardlythe only place where Cal’s engineersmake their mark. They contribute,

in spades, to one of Berkeley’s mostcherished institutions – the raucous andalways stellar marching band. Whileengineering students make up just 13percent of Berkeley’s total undergradu-ate population, they populate the bandin far higher percentages. Currently, 46percent of the 200 high-steppers in theband are engineering students.

“Music is a fairly mathematicalthing,” says third-year mechanical engi-neering student Allison Ryan, clarinetist.“It’s counting beats and dividing thingsup. You definitely have to do somemath in order to look at a measure andcome up with the rhythm.”

Engineering students bring more thansheer numbers and musical talent to theband. Ten years ago, an electrical engi-neering and computer sciences majordesigned the unique computer programcalled CalChart that allows students tomap out and design the band’s com-plex, fluid choreography. Coming upwith those patterns this year lies withfourth-year civil engineering studentJonathan Stan, a trombone player andthe band’s drum major. “We noticedthat the engineers were some of theshow’s best charters,” says Stan, whoalso dabbles in filmmaking. Before theyhad the luxury of a computerized cho-reography program, band memberssharpened their pencils and sketched

out on paper eachmember’s playingfield stepping pat-tern. “It took a dis-gusting amount oftime,” says Stan.

For engineeringstudents – who jug-gle some of themost demandingschedules on cam-pus – time is a valued commodityto be carefullyparceled out, asband members

search for creative ways to manage 10-20 hours per week for rehearsals. Ryan,who is a member of a mechanical engi-neering honors society, works atLawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryas an intern, and recently joined theAmerican Society of Mechanical Engi-neers, is up to the challenge. “My idea ofwhat I can fit into a semester might be alittle different from someone who’s not in the band,” she says.

“You have to commit to finding thetime and making sure you have thetime to do both things,” adds third-yearelectrical engineering and computer sci-ences student Titia Wong, who playsthe mellophone, an instrument similarto a French horn. “Otherwise you cut alittle here and a little there and hope itworks out.”

Being part of the Cal Band, whichsince its inception in 1925 has beenalmost entirely student run, appears to

be worth the frenzied scheduling andoccasional sleep deprivation. While thegroup has lost some of its autonomysince coming under the umbrella of theUniversity’s student musical activitiesdepartment a few years ago, the degreeof student control is still remarkable.Band members raise funds to maintainthe $400,000 annual band budget, planand rehearse performances, set up roadtrips, book hotel rooms, and make sureeveryone is well fed on the road.

Beyond their unique independence,band members point to the cama-raderie, the incredible sound, and ofcourse, the indomitable sporting spiritthat make the band such a draw. “It’sjust a good, big group of friends that’salways there,” says David Wagner,fourth-year manufacturing engineeringstudent, alto saxophone player, and for-mer senior manager of the band. “The‘Go Bears’ spirit stays with band mem-bers long after they graduate. It puts asmile on my face when I play myinstrument and see people smiling inthe stands who were in the class of ’50or ’60 and played in the band. Andthey can say to the grandchild on theirshoulders, ‘Hey, that’s the Cal Band.You should be clapping.’”

BY JESSICA M. SCULLY

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Student Gazette

Allison Ryan (in clear glasses) marches with the band.

STUDENT TRADESHOW: Mechanical engineeringprofessor Paul Wright, far right, admires the work ofstudents Anargyros Panayotopoulos and WarrenChow, team members on the prototype Airport PAL,a flight tracking and notification system. This wasone of many prototypes on display at lastNovember’s ME tradeshow, sponsored by Intel and

Ford Motor Company.Provided with high-tech sensors as theirbaseline technology,graduate studentswere challenged todesign an inconspicu-ous wearable productas their class assign-ment for Wright’sHigh-Tech ProductDesign and RapidManufacturing class.Other projects includ-ed a tracking device tohelp parents find alost child in a crowdedmall; wearable sen-sors that relay ath-letes’ vital signs backto the coach and warnof heat exhaustion;and a motorcycle hel-met equipped with awireless communica-tion system.

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Students create userinterface solutions fordisabled women

An allergy sensor that detects poten-tially harmful ingredients, such as peanuts or dairy. A jacket with

self-adjusting temperature control. A sports-utility wheelchair(SUW), that could driveover sandy beaches or roughmountain terrain. Personal flying machines.

For their first assignmentof the new semester, studentsin User Interface Design,Prototyping, and Evaluation,a computer science coursetaught by faculty memberJames Landay, spent a rainySaturday afternoon inJanuary with a dozen ormore women with disabili-ties, letting their imagina-tions run wild.

The “innovation workshop” at SodaHall brought together students, faculty,staff, and members of the disabled community. Their goal: to generateideas for the Institute for Women inTechnology’s Virtual DevelopmentCenter, an industry-supported partner-ship of universities and communitiesaimed at increasing women’s participa-tion in the design and development of technology.

Berkeley became a center site this pastfall and Landay’s class, ComputerScience 160, is the campus’s first coursecollaboration with the center. Studentprojects focus on designing appropriatecomputer technology for women withdisabilities.

The first half of the workshop aimedto open up lines of communicationamong participants. The second con-sisted of breakout sessions, in groups ofsix, designed to generate and refineideas for student projects, based on theinput of women with disabilities.

More than one student said the all-day workshop was an opportunity todiscuss technology outside a small circle

of “techno geeks.” For thewomen, it was a chance to be heard.

“A lot of people don’t take the time tounderstand or listen. People don’t see usas individuals,” Priscilla Moyers, a deafspecialist in sign language communica-tion, said through an interpreter. “Icame here. My ideas were heard, and I appreciate that very much.”

Other ideas – some more realisticthan others – came up at the session:PDAs, such as Palm Pilots, with voicerecognition; cookware with a “food-doneness” indicator; hands-free ATMmachines; a one-handed jar opener; ahand-held device that would translateaudio to text for the hearing-impaired;and a machine that makes the bed.

In fact, technology developed for the disabled can help everyone, saysLanday. “Engineering is all about how to solve design problems, givenconstraints.”

The women participants had a varietyof disabilities, says Maureen Fitzgerald,director of the local nonprofit groupComputer Technologies Program, whorecruited the community participants.“There are women here who are blind,deaf, have mobility impairment, andcognitive disabilities,” she says. “Thesewomen have helped students have an

expanded sense of what it’slike to have disabilities. Ithink it’s blowing theirminds.”

Landay’s 48 students wererequired to write, by the fol-lowing Monday, a two-pageessay on one of the projectideas. Says class memberJenny Nguyen, “I see mynormal routine in a wholenew perspective. It’s reallychanged the way I thinkabout things.”

BY FERNANDO QUINTERO

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Above: Faculty member JenniferMankoff, who teaches a coursein assistive technology, joinedthe workshop to meet with stu-dents and community memberswith disabilities.Left: James Landay takes notesat the January workshop, whichwas held to generate ideas for the Virtual DevelopmentCenter, an industry-supportedpartnership of universities and communities aimed at increas-ing women’s participation intechnology.

SMART INVENTIONS: Mechanical engineering seniorsJanine Pierce, top right, and Genevieve Gaspar, bottom,demonstrate their “decappitator,” a test tube decapperfor use in medical labs, at the Inventors’ Open House lastDecember, as mechanical engineering professor LiweiLin, looks on, left. (Not pictured are team members MikeMiklos and Ed Chan.) The event showcased student proj-ects from Lin’s Mechanical Engineering Design course.Student teams created “smart” mechanical engineeringproducts using computer-aided design (CAD) softwareand embedded microprocessors, in the process becom-ing familiar with product development, going from paper-and-pencil sketches to final products in one semester.Other inventions included a portable biochemical sensorand vaccine injector, robotic fish for underwater explo-ration, an autonomous golf trolley, and a mapping robot.

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Timely ethical issues inspire a newteaching model

Awalk in the woods can inspireintrospection, a chance perhaps to ponder solutions to personal

or global problems. While hiking inTilden Regional Park a couple of yearsago, Berkeley professor WilliamKastenberg and his wife, Gloria Hauser-Kastenberg, an attorney, ruminated abouthow they could integrate their profession-al and personal lives and learn moreabout each other’s ways of thinking.

About the same time, Kastenbergread a newspaper editorial by then-Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickmanabout the controversies surrounding theuse of genetically modified crops andfoods, which reminded the nuclearengineer of intense debates decades ear-lier surrounding nuclear technology. Asthe College of Engineering had institut-ed a new requirement for students totake a course in ethics, the Kastenbergsdecided to create and co-teach a courseon the role of ethics in the developmentand use of technology.

Rather than restrict the course toengineering students, the Kastenbergstook the rare step of approaching theCollege of Letters and Science, whicheach semester funds four undergraduatecourses not sponsored by a particulardepartment. The College administra-tion welcomed the collaboration be-tween an engineer and an attorney, andEthics and the Impact of Technology onSociety made its debut this spring.

The Kastenbergs’ course examinescomplex ethical issues, with broadlegal and social ramifications that haveemerged with current technology,exploring how various philosophies,religions, and societies have dealt withethical problems throughout history.“We shape our society through thetechnology developed here (at theUniversity of California),” saysKastenberg, an expert on nuclear reac-tor safety and environmental risk analy-sis. “And it seems to me that it’s our

obligation to talk to our students aboutthe implications.”

One need only look at the latest newsheadlines to know that students willface no shortage of pertinent, pressingethical issues to explore: cloning, stemcell research, nuclear waste disposal,biological warfare, genetically modifiedorganisms, and Internet security andprivacy. The timeliness of the subjectmatter attracted a diverse and largegroup of students; advanceinterest prompted theKastenbergs to increaseenrollment to 120 stu-dents, and by the secondweek of the term there wasstill a waiting list.

“I had never taken anethics course before, andbecause this one dealt withtechnology, I thought thatit would be a good way tocheck the field out,” says computer sci-ences major John Gibson. Oscar Lang,a senior in cognitive science interestedin Internet privacy issues, is surprisedby the democratic nature of the class,where everyone participates and deter-mines the course of discussions. “I’venever had a class organized this way,” he says.

With her expertise as a mediator inalternative dispute resolution and anoutsider’s perspective, Hauser-Kastenberg encourages a dialoguethroughout the course and extractscommon themes that could help stu-dents form their own set of ethics.Students will also work in teams of fiveeach on a project attempting to resolvean ethical issue tied to a modern tech-nology, by applying various theories as

well as individualethics. Gibson’s team,for example, will try totackle global warming.

In developing thecourse, the Kastenbergsstrove to include abroad range of culturalviewpoints. Kastenbergtook a sabbatical from2000 to 2001 that pro-vided the couple with

time to read, travel, and becomeimmersed in the subject. “We decidedto use ourselves and our relationship asan experiment,” says Hauser-Kastenberg.

They rented out their Berkeley hillshome and spent months with new sur-roundings, new people, and new ideas.The journey took them to the rain-forests of Ecuador, where they lived


Faculty Highlights

In their new ethics and technology course, William Kastenberg and Gloria Hauser-Kastenberg are creating a uniqueeducational experience for their undergraduate students.

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tens to add. “If students get a sense ofthe breadth and depth of the issues,I’d be happy.”

The Kastenbergs’ interest in the sub-ject won’t wane with the last lecture.They foresee similar courses in biologyor computer science. Plans are under-way for a campus symposium onethics and technology. And Kastenbergexpects his research to continue shift-ing toward new ways of assessing andmanaging the risks of complex techno-logical systems. “When you under-stand the risks and are finding ways tomanage those risks, you are dealingwith ethical issues,” he says. You neverknow where a trail through the woodsmay take you.

Wr i t t e n b y B l a k e E d g a r, s c i e n c e a c q u i s i t i o n se d i t o r a t Un i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s , a n d f o r m e r s e n i o r e d i t o r o f C a l i f o r n i a Wi l d . H e h a sc o - a u t h o r e d t h r e e b o o k s o n p a l e o a n t h r o p o l o g y,i n c l u d i n g T h e D a w n o f H u m a n C u l t u r e , j u s t p u b l i s h e d b y J o h n W i l e y, a n d F r o m L u c y t oL a n g u a g e . H i s w o r k a p p e a r s i n B a y A r e a a n dn a t i o n a l m a g a z i n e s .

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with members of the indigenous AshuarNation. They traveled to India to studywith Ramash Balseker, an octogenarianformer banker turned “nondualistic”philosopher, and to learn about thatcountry’s experience with the GreenRevolution in agriculture. Closer tohome, they spentthree days in a sem-inar with the DalaiLama, which ledthem to a concept of “compassionatetechnology” as aguiding principle for their course.

Most moderntechnology stemsfrom the linear,Cartesian paradigmthat has dominated Western scientificthought for three centuries, saysKastenberg. Descartes’ legacy includesa separation of science from spirit, ofhuman from nature, and faith inreductionism and empiri-cal observation as thebest ways to understanda system’s behavior.

But many cultures haveadopted a sophisticatedyet nonlinear code ofethics, and Hauser-Kastenberg believes thatincreasing globalizationobligates us to considerother ways of knowing.How might our societychange if we applied non-traditional approaches tothe creation of technology?If sustainability rather thanefficiency served as a pri-mary goal, would webehave differently?

The Cartesian paradigmmay fall short of support-ing a sufficient technolog-ical ethic. Take the exam-ple of MTBE, a gasolineadditive intended to con-trol air pollution but nowimplicated as a source ofgroundwater pollution.Says Kastenberg, “There’s

a failure to understand how complexour environment is. By trying to solveone problem, we created a problemthat’s more difficult to solve.”

Increasingly, the sorts of ethicaldilemmas that engineers and scientistsface have potentially global ramifica-

tions. They canalso be imper-ceptible in time– as rapid as anInternet stocktrade or as grad-ual as large-scaleclimate shifts.Methods ofquantifyingrisks, theKastenbergsagree, need to

catch up with the greater degrees ofuncertainty that accompany the latesttechnology.

“We’re not proposing that we havean answer,” Hauser-Kastenberg has-

Two professors, twoalumni elected toNational Academy ofEngineering for 2002

Two Berkeley professors – leaders in transportation systems and algorithm complexity – have been

elected to the National Academy ofEngineering (NAE), the highest profes-sional honor for an American engineer.

New members fromthe College of Engi-neering faculty are civil and environ-mental engineering professor and chairAdib K. Kanafani andcomputer science professor Christos H.Papadimitriou. They

are among 74 new members and sevenforeign associates elected this year.

Their election brings the totalBerkeley faculty membership in thisprestigious society to 86. Among aca-demic institutions, Berkeley maintainsone of the highest representations in theacademy.

Kanafani joined Berkeley’s civil engi-neering faculty in 1970, after earninghis Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1969. He cur-rently chairs his department and holdsthe Edward G. and John R. CahillChair for Civil Engineering. He alsoco-directs the National Center ofExcellence for Aviation OperationsResearch, a university-industry consor-tium funded by the Federal AviationAdministration.

Kanafani’s research interests center ontransportation planning and systemsanalysis. He was recognized by theNAE for “contributions to national andinternational air transportation, thedevelopment of U.S. research on intelli-gent transportation, and the educationof transportation professionals.”

Papadimitriou received his undergrad-uate degree in electrical engineering atAthens Polytechnic and his Ph.D. incomputer science at Princeton Univer-sity in 1976. He taught at Harvard,MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and

UC San Diego beforejoining Berkeley’s com-puter science faculty in1995, where he focuseson theories of algo-rithms and complexityand their applicationsto databases, artificialintelligence, and gametheory. The associatechair for Berkeley’s

computer science division, he also holdsthe C. Lester Hogan Chair in ElectricalEngineering and Computer Sciences.

The NAE cited Papadimitriou for“contributions to complexity theory,database theory, and combinatorialoptimization.”

In addition to Kanafani, two otherCollege of Engineering alumni wereelected this year. Michael J. Carey, CS’83, a technical director at BEA Systemsin San Jose, was cited for “contributionsto the design, implementation, and eval-uation of database systems.” AppleComputer Inc. co-founder StephenWozniak, EECS ’86, now chief executiveofficer of Unuson Corp., was cited for“the invention and development of thefirst mass-produced personal computer.”

New academy members will beinducted in October at a ceremony inWashington, D.C.

Faculty awards and honors

CEE professor Robert G. Bea wasawarded the Ralph Peck Medal bythe American Society of Civil

Engineers, citing his “pioneering contri-butions to the design of pile founda-tions for offshore platforms and appli-cation of reliability methods to thedesign of deep foundations.” Bea alsoreceived the Blakely Smith Medal fromthe Society of Naval Architects andMarine Engineers (SNAME) for his“vital contributions to the safety andintegrity of a broad range of offshoreand marine systems.”

Elwyn Berlekamp, Professor ofEECS and Mathematics, and AlanSmith, Professor of EECS, were named2002 Fellows by the American Associ-ation for the Advancement of Science.Smith was honored for his performanceanalysis of computer systems, “particu-

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larly the design of memory hierarchiesand cache memory design.”

CEE professor Anil K. Chopra hasbeen awarded the George W. HousnerMedal. The highest honor of theEarthquake Engineering ResearchInstitute, the Housner medal isbestowed on one individual per year forextraordinary and lasting contributionsto public earthquake safety through thedevelopment and application of earth-quake hazard reduction practices andpolicies. Chopra also received the 2001Norman Medal from the AmericanSociety of Civil Engineers (ASCE),given for the best paper among all jour-nals published by ASCE.

Chenming Hu, TaiwanSemiconductor ManufacturingCompany Distinguished Professor ofMicroelectronics, shared the 2002Solid-State Circuits Award from theInstitute of Electrical and ElectronicsEngineers with former EECS professorPing-Keung Ko. The award recognizedtheir distinguished contributions toMetal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) physicsand development of the Berkeley Short-Channel IGFET Model (BSIM) for cir-cuit simulation using complementarymetal oxide semiconductors (CMOS).

Douglas W. Fuerstenau, Professor inthe Graduate School, MSE, was electeda Foreign Fellow of the AustralianAcademy of Technological Sciences andEngineering. He was one of only twopeople elected as Foreign Fellows by theAustralian Academy in 2001.

IEOR professor Shmuel S. Oren hasbeen elected an Institute of Electricaland Electronics Engineers Fellow inrecognition of his research and develop-ment in power-system economics.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli,Professor of EECS, was named the2001 recipient of the ElectronicsDesign Automation Consortium’s pres-tigious Phil Kaufman Award. TheKaufman Award honors individuals“who have made a substantial sustain-able contribution to the success andadvancement of the electronic designindustry.” Sangiovanni-Vincentelli’sinvolvement with the design industrydates to the mid-1970s. F

Faculty Highlights

Adib Kanafani

ChristosPapadimitriou

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accessible means to get in touch withone another as well as stay in touchwith the College. We’re excited aboutthe possibilities.”

Using the personal identificationnumber (PIN) printed on the postcards(and included above the address on theback of this magazine), engineeringalumni can visit engineeralum.berke-ley.edu and register to take full advan-tage of the resource, or opt out of theservice altogether. Participants can usethe online directory, share career infor-mation, network with other Cal profes-sionals, serve as a resource for students,obtain a Berkeley e-mail forwardingaddress, or join e-mail discussion lists.

Friends of the College of Engineeringwho are not alumni may join a separatebut related online community.

To register or learn more, visithttp://engineeralum.berkeley.edu. If you have comments, send e-mail [email protected]. F

Alumni Affairs

Engineering@callaunched in April

By visiting http://engineeralum.berkeley.edu online, Berkeleyengineering alumni now have

access to a rich electronic resource, onethat can help them stay in touch withfriends and colleagues, or get moreinvolved with their alma mater.

The Berkeley campus and the Collegeof Engineering launched the new Web-based community in April, whenpostcards were mailed to alumniannouncing the program.

“We’re hoping that the newly launchedEngineering@cal program will strength-en lifelong relationships between alum-ni, the College of Engineering, and theUniversity community,” says GinaRieger, alumni affairs director for theCollege. “Alumni now have a free,

BERKELEY’S STARS SHINE:The DistinguishedEngineering Alumnus Awardsdinner, postponed from itsoriginal September 13 date,took place February 23 at theClaremont Resort Hotel. The2001 honorees were, clock-wise from left, Clayton D.Mote, Jr., ME ‘59 ‘60 ‘63, for-mer vice chancellor of univer-sity relations at Berkeley, nowpresident of the University ofMaryland, and a pioneer inthe field of biomechanics;Loring A. Wyllie, Jr., CE ‘60‘62, senior principal and chairof the board of DegenkolbEngineers and an internation-al leader in seismic-resistantstructural design; and WernerGoldsmith, ME ‘49, Berkeleymechanical engineering pro-fessor in the graduate schooland an expert on the engi-neering mysteries behindimpact and wave propaga-tion. The awards honor alum-ni for their achievements andservice to the engineeringprofession, the University,and the community.


Engineering Short Courses

For a full list of courses offered by UC Berkeley Extension, visit www.unex.berkeley.edu. Courses below

are part of the Berkeley SummerInstitute, held on the Berkeley campus.

J U N E

3-7 UNIX Kernel Internals: Implementation, Networking, and Tuning

6-7 Project Risk Management for Major Engineering and Construction Projects

10-11 Engineering Practical Microsystems for Biomedical Analysis

10-12 Modern Telecommunications

11-14 Fundamentals of MEMS

13-14 BioMEMS

17 Parametric Design of MEMS

17-18 Low-Cost High-Density Interconnect Technologies

17-18 Optical MEMS in Communication and Sensing

24-26 Plasma Etching and Reactive Ion Etching

26-28 Advanced Digital Integrated Circuits

27-29 Computer Security Crisis Intervention

28-29 Seismic Isolation Design

J U LY

8-9 Developing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Digital Signal Processing Systems

8-12 Analog Integrated Circuit Design in a Mixed-Signal Environment

12-13 Energy Dissipation Systems for Seismic Design of Buildings

15-17 Inventing the Future: User Interface Design, Prototyping,and Evaluation

18-19 Low-Power Circuits and Systems for Digital Wireless Communications

25-27 Exploring Critical Internet Technologies of Tomorrow

30-31 SDH/ATM Networks

AU G U ST

1-2 IP/MPLS Networks

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A L U M N I P R O F I L E S

Berkeley launchedFloyd Kvamme’s chip career

In spring of 2001, President GeorgeW. Bush appointed Floyd Kvamme,EE ’59, to co-chair the President’s

Committee of Advisors on Science andTechnology (PCAST). It’s the capper toa long, illustrious Silicon Valley careerin semiconductorsand venture capitalthat began atBerkeley’s College ofEngineering.

The first memberof his Norwegianimmigrant family togo to university,Kvamme choseBerkeley on theadvice of his highschool English teacher. “I loved mathe-matics, and he told me that engineeringis really applied math,” he recalls.Initially he considered majoring in civilinstead of electrical engineering, since itwas more familiar: Kvamme spent everyavailable moment after school workingon construction sites with his father, acarpenter, to help pay his tuition.

Kvamme’s pursuit of the nascentsemiconductor field originated not inhis undergraduate coursework, butfrom dropping in on afternoon collo-quia. “Berkeley’s openness was terrific– being able to wander in and hear a seminar,” he says. “They were mostlyfor graduate students, so I only under-stood 10 percent of the material. Thatwas enough to pique my interest.”

Electrical engineering at Berkeley inthe late ’50s was very close to a physicsmajor, according to Kvamme. “JohnWhinnery, the EE chair then, wantedto make sure that students got a verytechnical education,” he says. “And I justloved that. When I graduated, I had atechnical background that was – as Ilearned from engineers from otherschools – much stronger in the underly-ing physics and theory of my profession.”

After getting his master’s in semicon-ductor-focused EE from SyracuseUniversity, Kvamme went to work forthe seminal chip companies FairchildSemiconductor and NationalSemiconductor, which he helped trans-form from a small East Coast transistorcompany to a leading microelectronicssupplier. Running National’s AdvancedSystems subsidiary gave him the experi-ence he needed to head AppleComputer’s sales operations.

Then, in 1984, the premier venturecapital firmKleiner PerkinsCaufield &Byers madehim an “offertoo good torefuse,” toinvest and nur-ture cutting-edge chip start-ups. In March2001 Kvamme

moved his venture capital work to aback burner in order to head upPCAST, counseling President Bush ontechnology issues ranging from home-land defense to federal research-and-development spending.

Asked if there was anything he’dchange about how this career began,Kvamme says, “Taking part in collegiateathletics would have been a lot of fun,had my circumstances been different.But c’est la vie. I got a solid educationand had a great time at Berkeley.”

BY BONNIE POWELL

A L U M N I P R O F I L E S

Julia Gee deftly jugglesworking and volunteering

Julia Gee, ME ’82, isn’t just a worka-holic, she’s a volunteer-aholic. Looking at the professional activi-

ties page of her résumé, you’d think thesoft-spoken Gee was an entire army. Afew highlights: president of the BerkeleyEngineering Alumni Society (2000);coordinator of the National Society ofProfessional Engineers’ Golden GateMATHCOUNTS program for 15 of the

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19 years it’sbeen around; president of the GoldenGate chapter ofthe CaliforniaSociety of Pro-fessional Engineers for almost 10 years;chair of the San Francisco section of the American Society of MechanicalEngineers (1987, plus numerous otherpositions). And the list goes on.

And that’s in addition to her travel-intensive, full-time job with Bechtel.Gee started working for the engineeringconstruction corporation on a six-month, co-operative internship her junior year of college. She returned fulltime after graduation.

“What drives me is the opportunityto learn new things and Bechtel hasgiven me that,” she says. Since 1982 shehas rotated through Bechtel’s construc-tion, project control, 3-D simulation,and (currently) subcontract divisions,working on mammoth undertakingsranging from waste management facili-ties to a space vehicle processing andfueling annex in Kazakhstan.

Gee says that although few of herBechtel projects have drawn specificallyon her ME course work, the method oflearning itself has proven useful. “Everycompany has its own way of solvingproblems, and yet they use the samebasic engineering methodology,” sheexplains. “It isn’t about memorizingequations, but about knowing whichequations to pick under what circum-stances.”

As part of her plan to ease back onvolunteer activities – and in exchange,take a few more hiking and kayakingvacations – Gee is currently focusing onMATHCOUNTS. On a recent Saturdayshe rose at 5 a.m. to coordinate a com-petition for 110 sixth-, seventh-, andeighth-graders and 30 volunteers. “Ireally believe it’s helping to interestmore kids in math. I know it’s helpedenergize the math teachers, the ‘cham-pions’ of the program,” she says. “I’vegotten a lot from these organizations,and I like to give back.”

BY BONNIE POWELL

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Bequest of $3.5 million to benefitgraduate students

Margaret Lucas never took her Caldegree for granted. She earned itwhile she was in her 40s, after two

decades of secretarial work. And while thesight of a re-entry student is a commonone today, Lucas’ pursuit of a diploma,undertaken right after World War II,makes her a pioneer.

Lucas died in 1998 at the age of 92,leaving the bulk of her estate to theUniversity. “She lived practically herwhole life in Berkeley and always feltclose to the campus,” explains JimFerguson, a longtime friend and execu-tor of Lucas’ estate.

Her bequest of nearly $3.5 million willaid students in the College of Engineer-ing, and serves as an apt tribute toMargaret Lucas and her late husband,Frank, who graduated from Cal in 1930with a degree in civil engineering.

The couple lived for many years in ahome on Dwight Way, across from theClark Kerr Campus. Frank Lucas tookpart in designing and building the BayBridge and then spent the rest of hiscareer with Caltrans. Margaret Lucasworked as a secretary for the CaliforniaBoard of Health and later with theCalifornia Department of Health

Services, where one of her co-workerswas Ferguson.

“The student aid fund was her idea,”says Ferguson. “She talked about it a lot.She had the money and wanted to makesure it went to the students.”

Lucas’ bequest comes at an opportunetime. Students arriving at Berkeley forgraduate work find the cost of living to beone of the highest in the nation. Availablefellowship aid falls far short of the trueneed. While Stanford and even Michigan– a public university like Berkeley – areable to provide full, multi-year fellowshipsto a majority of their graduate students,most students at Berkeley must cobbletogether a patchwork of loans, instructor-ships, and year-to-year fellowship aid.

“Berkeley is the best place in the nationfor graduate study,” says Berkeley engi-neering dean A. Richard Newton. “Wewant to stay that way so we can provideleadership to tackle economic growth andsocial problems. Fellowships like theLucas fund are essential if we are to attractand keep the most promising students.”

Newton and other campus leadersestimate that the University’s fellowshipendowment must grow by several hun-dred million dollars if the campus is tocompete effectively for first-rank gradu-ate students. A campuswide initiative isbeing launched to close the gap over thenext five to 10 years.

BY KAREN RHODES

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College Support

PEDERSON HONORED: Family, friends, and colleagues of Professor Emeritus Donald O.Pederson gathered on November 16 for a special celebration — the ceremonial unveiling of the Donald O. Pederson Center for ElectronicSystems Design, located on the fifth floor ofCory Hall. More than 40 individuals contributedtowards a distinguished professorship and thenew center, both named to honor Pederson forhis pioneering work in integrated circuit andcomputer-aided design. Roughly 75 graduatestudents will conduct research in the Cory Hallcenter, which was renovated to make more efficient use of space, outfitted with new equipment, and set up for video conferencing.Pictured from left are Gary Baldwin, director ofthe new center and executive director of theGigascale Silicon Research Center; DonaldPederson; and electrical engineering professorRobert Brayton. Electrical engineering professorJan Rabaey has been named the first holder ofthe distinguished professorship.

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Clock is ticking for challenge match – lend your support by June 30BERKELEY ENGINEERING ALUMNI

VOLUNTEERS are just itching to give

their money away. Last fall, they per-

sonally pledged to match first-time and

increased gifts to the College of

Engineering – up to $125,500, right

out of their own pockets.

But the College will miss out on any

portion of that pledge that remains

untapped by June 30. So far, alumni

have matched a little more than half

the potential dollars. “I guess this is

the odd circumstance where I’d really

like to lose some money!” says Bob

Sanderson, IEOR, ’66 ’70, vice chair of

the alumni volunteers and a key alum-

nus fueling the pledge. “We’re hoping

to encourage all engineering alumni to

use up the entire matching fund – our

alumni giving rate needs a real boost.”

New and increased alumni gifts will

qualify for this much-needed support if

received by June 30. For details, con-

tact the Berkeley Engineering Fund,

510/643-6291.

Engineering giftsPrivate funds are vital to Cal’s excellence inengineering. Here the College recognizesnew pledges and gifts received betweenAugust 8, 2001, and March 4, 2002. Giftsand pledges from individuals ranged from$20,000 to $2.8 million. Corporate gifts of$200,000 or more are also listed.

We are grateful to our donors for their support of Berkeley engineering.

N E W M A J O R G I F TS A N D P L E D G E SNickhil H. Jakatdar, ’98 ’00Unrestricted to Electrical Engineering andComputer Sciences

Floyd & Jean Kvamme, ’59Engineering Annual Fund

Douglas W. Tsui, ’78, & Vanessa S. LamEngineering Annual Fund

The Estate of Margaret LucasLucas Scholarship Fund

Barbara P. NewellThe Gordon F. Newell Fellowship

Xinhui Niu, ’98Unrestricted to Electrical Engineering andComputer Sciences

Robert D. & Shirley A. Sanderson, ’66 ’70Engineering Annual Fund and support of IEOR

O RG A N I Z AT I O N SEricsson Inc.CITRIS Founding Corporate Member

Fujitsu, Ltd.Faculty Research

Hewlett-Packard CompanyCITRIS Founding Corporate Member

IBM CorporationCITRIS Founding Corporate Member

Intel CorporationCITRIS Founding Corporate Member

Sony CorporationElectrical Engineering and Computer SciencesEquipment

New lab wired for 21st-century education

When researchers officially unveiledthe new National SemiconductorMixed-Signal Systems Laboratory

on February 20, it was more like anorgan transplant than a mere facelift forCory Hall.

National Semiconductor’s $1.35 mil-lion gift enabled four rooms to be com-pletely gutted and rebuilt into a state-of-the-art classroom. The 200 to 250students per semester enrolled in DesignTechniques and Components for DigitalSystems, one of the core requirementsfor a degree in electrical engineeringand computer sciences, had previouslybumped elbows at workstations builtout of World War II-era Army surplusbenches. The new lab increases theoverall area from 1,800 to 3,400 square feet, replacing 26 full and 30partial workstations with 65 roomy,ergonomically correct full stations, amultimedia-equipped command centerfor the instructor, and a meeting area.

While the interior design is impres-sive, it is the cables snaking along floorsand beams that provide the lifebloodfor a 21st-century style of teaching. Inaddition to a pulse generator, mixed-signal oscilloscope, and other diagnosticequipment at every station, each Delldesktop has a video camera, micro-phone, and speakers hooked into amultimedia local area network.

All workstations are wired to theteaching assistant’sdesk for sound andvideo, so the assistantcan hear and see stu-

dents when they ask questions. Theclass can watch a multichannel demon-stration of the answer on pull-downscreens around the room – or on theirown computers, by way of a whiteboardcamera, an instrument camera, and alink to the teaching assistant’s ownhigh-resolution screen. Two wall-mounted plasma displays flash courseupdates and announcements.

Before the lab’s unveiling, EECS pro-fessors Ron Fearing, John Wawrzynek,Robert Meyer, and chair Shankar Sastrypresented their plans for the lab to 20National Semiconductor attendees,including CEO Brian Halla, who hadnurtured the project. Executive ViceChancellor and Provost Paul R. Grayinitiated the lab idea when he was deanof engineering. Halla later presented anEECS joint colloquium, “The Sightand Sound of Information – Definingthe Future Beyond the PC,” to studentsand faculty in Soda Hall’s Hewlett-Packard Auditorium.

National Semiconductor, which hashelped fund the construction of SodaHall and other projects, also establisheda distinguished professorship to accom-pany the new lab. Chip legend Meyer –whose book Analysis and Design ofAnalog Integrated Circuits is now in itsfourth edition – has been named thefirst holder of the professorship.

BY BONNIE POWELL

Left: National Semiconductor’s Brian Halla, right,with Dean A. Richard Newton at the Februaryunveiling of Cory Hall’s spacious new mixed-signalsystems lab.

Right: Brian Halla, left, and Professor WilliamOldham admire the new workstations that stu-dents and teaching assistants will use to interactelectronically in the renovated lab space.

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C O M I N G E V E N T S I N B E R K E L E Y E N G I N E E R I N G

For details on these and other engineering events,

visit www.coe.berkeley.edu/events

Presidential Library ToursSaturday, May 11Saturday, May 18

The Southern California Engineering AlumniSociety will sponsor tours of two presiden-tial libraries. On May 11, visit The RichardNixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.On May 18, tour the Ronald W. ReaganPresidential Library and Museum in SimiValley.

Day in the Wine CountrySaturday, May 18

The Northern California Engineering AlumniSociety is sponsoring a tour of the UC DavisDepartment of Viticulture & Enologyresearch station in Oakville, followed bylunch and a tour of two Napa Valley wineries. Space is limited.

College of EngineeringCommencementSaturday, May 25

Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley Campus, 9 a.m.

Family, graduates, alumni, faculty, andfriends will gather for a morning filled withprocessions, pomp and circumstance, andphotographs. 510/643-7992.

Hearst Memorial Mining BuildingRenovation ToursFriday, May 31Friday, June 28

Berkeley Campus, 3:30 p.m.

Join alumni and friends for a first-hand lookat the renovation and seismic retrofit of theHearst Memorial Mining Building in theselast tours before the fall semester opening.There is no charge for the tour, and lightrefreshments will be served at the construc-tion site. RSVP to EAS, 510/643-7100 [email protected].

Berkeley in Silicon ValleySymposiumSaturday, June 1

Hayes Mansion Conference Center, San Jose 8:30 a.m. - 2:15 p.m.

Sponsored by the Engineering AlumniSociety and the Colleges of Engineering andChemistry, this second annual event fea-tures nine outstanding faculty members ofthe two colleges who will speak about theirevolving research in nanotechnology andbiotechnology.

Southern California Alumni MeetingThursday, June 6

Southern California Engineering AlumniSociety Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, fea-turing keynote speaker CEE ProfessorAbolhassan Astaneh-Asl, speaking on “TheCollapse of the World Trade Center, LessonsLearned.”

Nominate DistinguishedEngineering AlumniFriday, June 21

Nominate candidates for the 2002Distinguished Engineering Alumni Awardsby Friday, June 21. Visitwww.coe.berkeley.edu/alumni/deaa_cover.html for details.

Symposium to HonorChang-Lin TienSaturday, June 22

The Department of Mechanical Engineeringcelebrates the legacy of former Chancellorand University Professor Emeritus Chang-LinTien with a day-long symposium highlight-ing his contributions to research, highereducation, and public policy.

Hearst Memorial MiningBuilding ReopeningVisit www.coe.berkeley.edu/events fordetails on the official reopening event beingplanned.www.coe.berkeley.edu/events

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