• Since the advent of wireless and mobile technology, the communications sector has witnessed an indomitable growth in its journey to bridge the distances across the world. The demand for better connectivity, high bandwidth and data speeds for wireless internet, techniques to convert real world signals into digital form for processing and transmission, and most importantly, achieving all of this without sacrificing power, has demanded considerable research focus.
• The ECE group at IIT Bhubaneswar is committed to make the technology more directed for practical applications. The R&D focus has been on applications such as speech-based access of agricultural commodity prices, and weather information in the local Odia language, which involves automatic speech recognition, and responses through pre-recorded and dynamically generated dialects. The biggest highlight of this system is that it needs no internet connection.
• The major thrust areas of the group are:   communication and modulation technologies including MIMO-based transceiver designs
  1. 1. space shift keying (SSK) systems using antenna arrays
  2. 2. energy harvesting communications for simultaneous transmission of information and power over the same channel
  3. 3. technology in healthcare, including design of wearable wireless healthcare monitoring systems
  4. 4. Internet of things (IoT)-based health monitoring
  5. 5. Bio Signal Processing
  6. 6. Computer Vision
  7. 7. Machine Learning & Deep Learning
  8. 8. Coding techniques, Algebraic Error Correcting Codes; Index Coding; Network Coding; Coded caching; Coded Distributed Computing

• If there has been a boom in the wireless communications industry over the last four decades, it has been due to the strides made in radio frequency (RF) and microwave technology, which essentially forms the back-end of modern day wireless communication systems which offer high range, throughput, low power consumption, and high data rates.
• At ECE, significant focus is placed to direct microwave technology for not just communications, but also for several other applications in their own domain.
• The major thrust areas of the group are:
  1. 1. the design of RADAR systems to detect human vital signs for search and rescue operations
  2. 2. bone health detection and classification using microwaves
  3. 3. metamaterial absorbers and reflectors; modelling and design of high Q/high SRF planar RF inductors
  4. 4. coupling and hybrid structures for RF measurement applications
  5. 5. tunable and reconfigurable RF subsystems for broadband performance with spurious rejections
  6. 6. Remote sensing: Microwave and Optical Sensors for Healthcare, Optical sensor Structural Health Monitoring
  7. 7. Antenna and Antenna Arrays, Microwave Absorvers and Polarisers, Computational Methods and Radio frequency identification (RFID) system
  8. 8. Communication Systems: Wireless Communication (Front-end Design, MIMO Systems, THz Communications) Green Communication (Cognitive Communication, Energy Harvesting)
  9. 9. Computational Techniques (Traditional and Evolutionary Nature-Inspired Methods)
  10. 10. Radar Systems: Vehicular MM-wave Radar, Ground Penetrating Radar, Through-wall Imaging Radar

1. 1. • If there has been a boom in the wireless communications industry over the last three decades, it has been due to the strides made in radio frequency (RF) and microwave technology, which essentially forms the back-end of modern day wireless communication systems which offer high range, low power, and high data rates.
      • Looking at the ever-increasing demands for high bandwidth, optical networks are a gateway to the future of communication systems. At ECE, significant focus is placed to direct microwaves and optical technology for not just communications, but also for other applications such as design of distributed fiber optical sensor systems for structural health monitoring of oil and gas pipelines, which offers ranges up to tens of kilometers using a single fiber cable.
      • The next generation wireless networks require fronthauls/backhauls that can provide immense data rate support while being inexpensive. Shared optical networks like passive optical network (PON) is a primary candidate for future fronthauls. However, the original medium access control (MAC) protocols designed for PONs are not suitable for the purpose. Hence, carefully designed MAC protocols are the need of the hour.
      • Another candidate for fronthauls is free space optics (FSO) owing to its data carrying potential and cost effectiveness. Data transmission using the FSO network comes with its own set of challenges like atmospheric turbulence, scintillation, absorption, scattering, etc.  All these impairments affect network reliability. Hence, building an FSO network also requires carefully designed algorithms, which is also being researched upon.
      • The major thrust areas of the group are:
        1. 1. Optical Communication
        2. 2. Optical Sensor
        3. 3. Photonic-electronic signal processing
        4. 4. Fiber Sensor-based Structural Health Monitoring System Design
        5. 5. Architecture and MAC protocol design for wireless-optical integrated networks, optical access networks, wireless access networks, edge computing, and free space optical networks

1. 1. • Consumer electronics demand use of ultra-small, scalable and easily modifiable engineering entities which should act as the ‘heart’ of any electronic system. In the world of technology boom where every electronic product is ‘machine learned’ and ‘smart’, pushing Moore’s Law to its limits is obvious.
      • With the advent of nanotechnology, quantum technology and alternate-to-silicon materials, electronic device research is much more than just laboratory findings which is even more backed by the recent Government of India missions. To address these national and global requirements, the Semiconductor Devices group at IIT Bhubaneswar is readily playing their roles.
      • Blended by a combination of electronic materials, silicon and wide bandgap semiconductors and state-of-the-art simulation, modeling and fabrication process lines, the group forms an efficient combination in performing translational research in a plethora of applications covering various sectors.
      • The major thrust areas of the group are:
        1. 1. Sensors and spectroscopy
        2. 2. Wide bandgap semiconductors and power devices,
        3. 3. Emerging nanoelectronic devices, electronic materials
        4. 4. 3D NAND memory, energy generation and storage devices
        5. 5. Reliability analysis of semiconductor devices,
        6. 6. Machine learning augmented with TCAD analysis of semiconductors
        7. 7. Semiconductor device modelling
        8. 8. Cryogenic-CMOS for analog front end circuitry
        9. 9. Device circuit co-design

1. • Efforts are on to push the boundaries to achieve large scale integration of circuits with high speed, and low power. Much of the R&D efforts are directed to design of heterogeneous multi-core systems with emphasis on resource-aware programming paradigms. This is backed up with design of tightly coupled processor arrays and accelerators, with emphasis on synthesizable logic structures, with the aim of integrating them into bus-based architecture systems. These systems are shown to be useful to run intensive, nested-loop programs.
   • Performance enhancement with respect to speed and area requires knowledge of the architecture supported by the target prototyping platform, such as a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The exercise involves identification of the subset of Boolean logic functions which amicably maps to FPGA slice primitives through proper configuration using fast hardwired routing fabric and use lower amount of programmable routing resources.
   • FPGAs support only a handful logic cell configurations, for which not many high speed implementation variants exist for a particular design. The research group at ECE addresses the involved design challenges of speed-area efficient implementations and inclusion of VLSI testability, fault detection, fault localization and fault tolerance with minimal overhead.
   • Faculty members also work in the area of Analog, RF, and Mixed-Signal VLSI Integrated Circuits and Systems.
   • There is also ongoing interdisciplinary research combining VLSI and microwave, which involves design of single-chip network analyzer testsets for 5G field testing and measurement applications, which offer broad bandwidth and high dynamic range.
   • The major thrust areas of the group are:
     1. Programmable Hardware Accelerators and Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures
     2. System-on-Chip Design
     3. Low power VLSI ASIC Design
     4. High Level Synthesis and CAD for VLSI
     5. Digital VLSI Architectural Design of ICs and FPGA Architectures
     6. VLSI architectures for digital signal processing
     7. VLSI architectures for computer arithmetic
     8. VLSI architectures for fault tolerant & fault testable hardware design
     9. Circuit design for high speed serial link (full-duplex, 4-PAM signaling, CTLE and DFE design, Equalizer adaptation)
     10. Signaling across Silicon interposer and MCM
     11. On-Chip DC-DC converters
     12. Phase-Locked Loop; ADC Design for high speed serial Links; CMOS circuit design for Silicon Photonics.
     13. IC Design for Neuromorphic Intelligence and Wireless Communications
     14. New Radio System Architectures for Next-Generation Wireless Standards and RF/Wireless System-on-Chip (SoC) Design

Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Core NLP: Natural Language Inference, Semantics and Relation Extraction, Summarization, Translation, Question Answering, Text Classification, NLP for Low resource Indian Languages, Speech Recognition/translation (Dr. Abhik Jana, Dr. Shreya Ghosh)
• Advanced NLP Techniques: Large Language Models (LLM), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Multi-Agent NLP Tasks, Lightweight NLP models. (Dr. Shreya Ghosh, Dr. Abhik Jana)
• Domain-Specific NLP Tasks: Social Media Analytics from Text (Fake News Detection, Hate Speech Detection), Legal, Medical Document analysis (Dr. Abhik Jana, Dr. Shreya Ghosh)

Computer Vision (CV)

• Visual Surveillance, Robotic Vision (Dr. Debi Prosad Dogra, Dr. Ram Prasad Padhy)
• Image Processing & Multi-modal Perception: Image Fusion, Object Detection, Visual Analysis, Scene Understanding (Dr. Ram Prasad Padhy, Dr. Debi Prosad Dogra)

Application Areas of AI and ML

• Intelligent Transportation Systems, Augmented Reality, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, Healthcare, Agriculture, Applications in Visual Surveillance (Dr. Debi Prosad Dogra, Dr. Ram Prasad Padhy, Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty)
• Spatio-temporal Data Analytics for GIS Applications: Human and Wildlife Movement Pattern Analysis, Night-time Light Data Analytics (Dr. Shreya Ghosh)
• Sustainable AI: Performance and Energy Efficiency of Large Language Models (LLM), Deep Learning Models (DL). AI assisted Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) and Autonomous Vehicle Domain Specific SoC (DSSoC) design, Hardware/Software codesign of AI systems. (Dr. Devashree Tripathy, Dr Debi Prosad Dogra, Dr. Ram Prasad Padhy)
• Modeling, Verification, and Ethical Analysis of AI Systems: Formal Methods in AI System Design, Safety-Critical AI Verification, Ethical AI and Fairness, Bias Detection and Mitigation in AI Models, Risk Assessment in AI Applications, AI System Reliability and Robustness, Accountability and Transparency in AI Systems ( Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty, Dr. Shreya Ghosh)

Computer Architecture & High-Performance Computing (HPC)

• Fundamental Computer Architecture: Performance, Power, and Fault Analysis of CPU, General Purpose GPU (GPGPU), Micro-architecture, Run-time systems, Scheduling, Memory, Conventional & CXL-based Interconnects, 3D Stacked Memory, Ray Tracing and Graphics Architectures. (Dr. Debiprasanna Sahoo, Dr. Devashree Tripathy)
• Computer Architecture and ML: TinyML, Computer Architecture for ML Applications, Accelerating Federated Learning, Application of ML to Computer Architecture, Accelerating Large Language Models  (Dr. Debiprasanna Sahoo, Dr. Devashree Tripathy)
• High-Performance Computing (HPC): Performance Optimization, Energy Efficiency and Reliability of Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS), Data Center Architecture, Heterogeneous Computing. (Dr. Devashree Tripathy, Prof. Ashwini K. Nanda, Prof. Manoranjan Satpathy)

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) & Internet of Things (IoT)

• Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS): Systems Design and Development, Modelling, Verification, Complex Systems, Healthcare Monitoring Systems, Trusted Computing, Safety Verification of CPS (Dr. Sudipta Saha, Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty, Dr. Padmalochan Bera)
• Internet of Things (IoT): TinyML, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Multi-Robot Systems (Dr. Sudipta Saha)
• Energy Efficient IoT Systems: TinyML for healthcare, Edge Computing, Generative AI at the Edge, Sustainability at the Edge, Learning and Inference on the Edge. (Dr. Devashree Tripathy)

Networking & Cybersecurity

• Network Security & Privacy: Cryptography, Secure Communications, Multi-party Computation, Access control, AI for Security and Privacy, Wi-Fi Security (Dr. Padmalochan Bera, Dr. Sumana Maiti, Dr. Pragati Shrivastava)
• Software-Defined Networks (SDN): Security and Protocol Verification, SDN, Applications of SDN, Security of SDN and Programmable Data Planes. (Dr. Padmalochan Bera,  Dr. Pragati Shrivastava)
• IoT Security: Privacy-preserving Secure Communication, IoT-specific Security ( Dr. Sudipta Saha, Dr. Sumana Maiti)

Software Engineering & Formal Methods

• Software Testing & Verification: Formal Methods, Software Verification, Runtime Monitoring (Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty, Prof. Manoranjan Satpathy)
• Formal Modeling & System Design: Model Synthesis, Transformation, and Verification for Security and System Design  (Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty)
• Application of Formal Methods to Computer Architecture: Micro-architecture Verification, GPU Pipeline Verification, CXL Verification, Cache Controller Design Verification, Statistical and Formal Model Checking Techniques. (Prof. Manoranjan Satpathy,Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty, Dr. Debiprasanna Sahoo)

Programming Languages and Compilers

• DSLs, source-source compilers, program analysis and optimization (Dr. Srinivas Pinisetty)