BBC Technology Online features a lively account by ECS academic Dr Peter Wilson of the surreal environment of manufacturing plants for silicon chips.

The process of making silicon chips is as complex as the chips themselves. Each manufacturing plant, or 'fab', may cost billions of dollars and is a triumph of engineering. But working inside these hi-tech plants can be a surreal experience, according to Dr Peter Wilson of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, whose account is featured by the BBC, as part of a new focus on The Computing Age.

Dr Wilson joined ECS in 2002, after a number of years working in the electronics industry.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science will next year be opening a new £55M interdisciplinary state-of-the-art clean room which will advance the Schools's research in electronics and nanotechnology.

An ECS academic presented new insights into the experiences of students with disabilities at a conference held in Colorado this month.

Mrs E A Draffan, of the ECS Learning Societies Lab, gave a keynote presentation entitled 'Assistive Technology in Higher Education' – UK Style at the 10th Annual Accessing Higher Ground:Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference on 8 November.

In her address, Mrs Draffan pointed out how technologically able many disabled students have become in the UK, as a result of which those facilitating learning have had to become more flexible in their approach to these technologies. She cited examples from her recent experience on the LexDis project, which explores the e-learning experiences of disabled learners within one institution - the University of Southampton.

She also looked at the legal, financial and study-skill support mechanisms available to graduate and postgraduate students with disabilities in the UK and discussed some of the developments in assistive technologies used by students, faculty and student services.

Mrs Draffan trained as a Speech and Language Therapist and worked in the field of communication difficulties before specialising in Dyslexia and Assistive Technology. She has since worked with disabled students in Further and Higher Education, set up an Assistive Technology Centre and worked with TechDis (a Joint Information Systems Committee funded initiative) on several projects.

A powerful new electromagnetic modelling tool has been developed with the help of ECS which could save companies time and money as they realise their design goals.

The latest release of the well-known electromagnetic simulation tool, Opera, was designed and created by Vector Fields in partnership with the University of Southampton.

Opera version 12 provides users with integrated design-simulate-optimise tools to create design models, simulate electromagnetic behaviour (and optionally related physics including temperature and mechanical stress), post-process results, and iterate the concept to reach the optimal solution.

Opera is available in numerous variants, with generic 2D and 3D finite element analysis (FEA) solvers for static and time-varying electromagnetic fields, and with application-specific solvers for design work involving rotating machinery, superconducting magnets, particle beams, dielectric insulation, and magnetisation/demagnetisation processes. The latest release extends the performance of many of these solvers to enhance simulation fidelity and speed.

‘This powerful tool was developed as a result of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University and Vector Fields,’ said Professor Jan Sykulski of the Electrical Power Engineering group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

"Opera's integrated design-simulate-optimise toolchain allows organisations to reach the optimal solution much faster - eliminating the huge cost associated with physical design iteration cycles,’ added Dr Kevin Ward at Vector Fields. ‘The incredible amount of intellectual property built into this toolsuite can cut months from the most challenging of projects.’

The 2008 edition of the School of Electronics and Computer Science calendar is now available from Zepler foyer and from UG computing lab.

Make sure you collect your copy of one of this year’s hottest Christmas presents! Featuring photographs of progress on the new Mountbatten Building, as well as a stunning shot of the School’s computer science base on University Road, the calendar also covers student life and events in the School, including the new Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Lab, the Individual Research Project, and Graduation. The School’s biggest news story of 2007, the VIBES microgenerator, is also featured, as well as the first appearance in Europe of the Artificial Life conference, being hosted by ECS in Winchester during August.

With dates of semesters and vacations highlighted, the ECS Calendar is a great gift to take home for Christmas!

The School's flourishing MSc programme expands next year with a new programme in AI, as excellent results are announced for last year's programme.

Results for last year’s MSc programme have just been released and congratulations go to everyone for a series of excellent performances! Our picture shows the end-of-the-year event for MSc, and we’re very pleased that a number of students have stayed on in the School to do PhDs.

This year we have 145 MSc students in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, our biggest-ever group. ‘We’ve made a huge investment in establishing our MSc courses and are very pleased to see such a strong intake of students,’ said Dr Darren Bagnall, Director of the MSc programme. ‘This year we have more students, on more courses and from more countries than ever before. We’re pleased to announce that we have greatly increased the number of staff and resources available for the Masters courses to ensure that our students have the best possible time during their short stay with us.’

From October 2008 ECS will be offering a new Masters course in Artificial Intelligence, bringing together in one programme some of the most exciting and innovative work taking place in the School. Artificial Intelligence techniques are increasingly used in support of complex systems and applications from a number of global companies and ECS has internationally recognized expertise in areas such as computer vision, intelligent agents, machine learning, robotics and the Semantic Web. This new course will enable student to gain a thorough grounding in these areas, as well as benefiting from internationally-leading research expertise.

Pocket-sized supercomputers and zero power mobile phones are just two of the key challenges which UK engineers have set themselves for the next 20 years.

The goals are part of the Grand Challenges in Microelectronic Design, a scheme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and co-ordinated by the University of Southampton, which has enabled the UK microelectronic design research community to develop a common vision for the future of research in its area.

Key investigators are Professor Andrew Brown (University of Southampton), Professor Steve Furber (University of Manchester) and Professor Roger Woods (Queen’s University Belfast). Four grand challenges have emerged from a number of community meetings which the investigators believe will keep the UK at the forefront of electronics for the next 20 years.

They propose to:

Build an electronic brain – a computer inspired by the principles of operation of biological brains;

Develop pocket-sized supercomputers which will deliver as much computing power as a whole building of today’s machines, as part of a drive to deliver ‘Moore for less’ (Moore’s Law describes the exponential year-on-year growth in the number of transistors available on a silicon chip);

Create a mobile phone which will not need batteries but will use renewable energy sources;

Embark on a ‘Silicon meets life’ initiative, through which they plan to develop transparent interfaces between living organisms and electronics allowing active prosthesis and biometrics.

‘We have pulled together some of the best brains in the UK in this field to address some of the long-term challenges so that we can boost our input to the knowledge economy,’ said Dr Peter Wilson, one of the researchers on the project at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

Professor Steve Furber added: ‘The UK has great strengths in microelectronic design, and the Common Vision activity has provided a focus for the high quality but distributed academic research. From the outset we have involved industrial researchers in our workshops and there has been a very positive reaction to what we have proposed. The next phase is to bring this to the attention of the wider industrial community.’

The research organisers are now seeking feedback on their proposals and devising plans to move the challenges forward.

'I enjoy using the ability to design and build machines that can do neat things for us', says Dr David Swaffield, new lecturer in Electrical Power Engineering.

Dr Swaffield is himself a graduate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, having been an MEng student of Electromechanical Engineering and then a PhD student. He has already achieved distinction in his career, with the award in 2005 of the IEEE Eric Foster Young Scientist Award for a paper based on some of the research in his PhD.

His research continues with a varied range of projects based in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory which include looking at materials for superconducting applications, lightning testing of aircraft parts built from composites, and the amount of energy that can be pushed through high-voltage cables in tunnels.

Read our profile of David Swaffield.

Dr Ivan Markovsky studied in Bulgaria, the USA, and Belgium, before coming to ECS as a lecturer in the Information: Signals, Images, Systems group.

A major part of his PhD work was devoted to applying an extension of the classical least squares method to data modelling. Through his studies, he recognised that a large class of problems can be treated with one and the same algorithm, while previously each problem required a new algorithm. This was a significant breakthrough which allows data modeling stages to be bypassed thus resulting in considerable time savings.

Ivan joined ECS in January 2007 and plans to find more applications for the method that he is developing and to promote it as a universal framework for data modelling.

'Although I'm not a mathematician, I love mathematics,' he said. 'Engineering is a discipline where rigorous thinking is very important. I look forward to making the abstract theory useful in applications.'

Read our profile of Ivan Markovsky.

The dynamic fractal patterns on the glass panels of the new Mountbatten Building were inspired by the School's research on optical nanotechnology.

In association with the Optoelectronics Research Centre, this research is being applied to create new optoelectronic devices which could enhance optical communications or greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

The £55 million building, currently under construction and due for completion in July 2008, will provide a world-class facility that will allow the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre to make further contributions in these exciting areas of research.

The fractals, which form an ornamental design on the glass of the new building, are inspired by research into optical metamaterials, conducted by Dr Darren Bagnall and Dr Adrian Potts at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) working with Professor Nikolay Zheludev of the ORC.

‘By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things they normally wouldn’t do,’ said Dr Bagnall. ‘The chiral fractal structures when etched into glass at the nanoscale were shown to produce very unusual polarisation changes. By using similar technologies to produce other types of nanostructured arrays on the surfaces of solar cells we could also ensure that optical asymmetries are created that prevent light from escaping the solar cells.’

According to Dr Bagnall the light-trapping technologies could reduce the thickness of expensive semiconductor materials needed in solar panels, and this could directly reduce the cost of the devices. The first challenge is to prove that the technology works in practice, the second key challenge will be to develop cost-effective ways to produce nanopatterned layers.

The research will continue in the new Mountbatten Building. The state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary facility designed specifically to meet the long-term research needs of the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre, contains a large purpose-built clean room and associated laboratories, along with offices and meeting space.

'The technology which will be available in our new building, coupled with our high-quality academics, students and support staff, will enable us to develop faster, smaller, lower-cost, lower power, more environmentally-friendly devices for the next generations of electronic products whilst continuing our pioneering work in computer science,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of ECS.

With only one week of term left, undergraduate and MSc students in ECS were able to take time out of a hard term's studying to enjoy the School Christmas Party.

The Christmas Party was organized by the Electronics and Computer Science Society, the School's own student society which organizes social events, academic and careers talks, and has an active sports programme.

Around 400 students attended the party, held in the Staff Social Centre, with entertainments from the Circus Society, the Breakdance Society, Kinki DJs, and of course Santa Claus, in the person of Alex Horn, 2nd year Computer Science student.