Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Emergence and applications of novel electronic and electrical technologies have spread into almost every corner of our lives, from patient monitoring to wireless power transmission, and terahertz imaging and sensing. As a result, the range of operating frequencies in electrical and electronic systems has been extended from a low frequency of a few Hertz to terahertz and optical frequency. Such applications have made designs of related electrical and electronic circuits and systems very challenging; this is because circuits and systems are required to be of low cost and small size, and electromagnetic effects and stochastic phenomena, such as spatial field distributions, parasitics, radiation, plasmonics, noises and random material property variations, are no longer negligible. As a result, a single unifying efficient and effective electromagnetic modeling and design platform that can simulate all electrical and electronic phenomena, including noises from low to optical frequency, is very much desirable in order to shorten design cycles and increase competitiveness. Our recent preliminary work in generalizing existing numerical methods has presented the possibility of creating such a unifying platform; it will not only place numerical methods under a single mathematical framework, but also allow easy development of new numerical methods catering to specific problems. The proposed research program is intended to expand and complete our preliminary unfinished original work by developing a mathematical unifying platform with a full theory and create an associated software package for efficient and effective electromagnetic modeling of electronic and electrical components and systems. The developed platform and software package will be then applied to model and design new components and systems for emerging applications in low-frequency underground & underwater modeling for search & rescue, wireless power transmission for home appliance and automobile charging, ultra-wideband systems for home based health monitoring and communications among vehicles, nano-devices, and terahertz systems for imaging and detection of biological tissues and chemical agents (e.g. explosives and DNA) for safety and security.