A co-founding partner in Fernando Hale & Chang LLP, Ron translated his engineering background into a thriving practice focused on patent procurement, technology licensing, IP due diligence studies, and strategic IP portfolio management. His clientele are engaged in a variety of technologies including consumer electronics, medical devices, software, mobile communication systems, alternative energy, e-commerce, imaging and quantum computing.

While at Carleton, Fernando received a Senate Medal for Electrical Engineering and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council scholarship for graduate research.

Bottomley, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry,  will use his scholarship to pursue his photonics research in collaboration with Drs. Jacques Albert and Winnie Ye from the Department of Electronics.

“Most of my research is focused on the properties of silver nanocubes, which are just very tiny cubes made out of ordinary silver metal,” says Bottomley. “The special properties of these tiny metal cubes comes from the fact that they are so small they interact with visible light very strongly, essentially trapping the light in the cube. I am working with Dr. Albert to use these cubes and optic fibers to produce a powerful versatile sensing platform, and with Dr. Ye in an attempt to increase the efficiency of thin film solar cells.”

Aleali and Xiong are both members of Dr. Ye’s Micro/NanoPhotonics Group. Their silicon photonics research with Dr. Ye and collaborators at the National Research Council Canada is aimed at utilizing existing fabrication facilities to provide much faster and cheaper optical telecom devices.

Aleali, a master’s student, is working on an efficient optical modulation device that encodes digital data on a stream of light, using what’s called Pockels effect in Silicon.

Explains Aleali:  “Essentially it converts an electrical signal to an optical signal which can then travel with speed of light across the room, the city, or the world. We expect this research will be used in next generation telecom and datacom networks.”

Xiong, a PhD candidate, is focusing on designing novel photonic devices based on silicon photonic platforms. The devices can manipulate the light in the submicron scale, which is useful for sensing biomolecules.

The International Society for Optics and Photonics is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The society serves more than 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.

Electronics students Tim Inglis, Alim Baytekin, Natalie Lavasseur and Alborz Erfani took top spot. This is the second consecutive win for Carleton. The first runner up was the industrial design team of Ruby Hadley, Carmen Liu and Andrew Theobald that developed a variety of assistive devices for users in rural Uganda requiring better mobility so that they could participate in small business. The second runner up was Neil Voornneveld, whose navigation system alerts users to obstacles in their environment and provides location on command via audio.

“The 3-D prosthetic hand is an extraordinary invention that could make the world far more accessible for anyone missing a limb,” says Alastair Summerlee, Chair of COU and President of the University of Guelph.

The prosthetic hand is more nimble when it comes to opening doors or picking up small items such as eggs, and costs considerably less than the average of $15,000 for prosthetic limbs, its inventors say.

Inglis and Baytekin will continue to work on the prosthetic hand over the summer. They have received support from Tom Skinner, MEng/72, who donated funds to run a two-year pilot project that will help engineering students begin to commercialize a fourth-year group project.

About IDeA

Ontario universities are committed to the provincial goal of creating an accessible environment on campus, and in all walks of life. The IDeA competition asks Ontario undergraduate students to use their creativity to come up with ideas to turn that goal into reality.

This year, 18 of 21 Ontario universities participated in the contest, which is supported through the Ontario government’s EnAbling Change Program and COU’s partners at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario in the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment.

Next year’s competition will focus on parasport and active living in honour of the upcoming Pan American and Para-Pan American games taking place in Ontario.

Thanks to a donation by Tom Skinner, MEng/72, who donated funds to run a two-year pilot project that will help engineering students begin to commercialize a fourth-year group project, Inglis and Baytekin will be able to take the project further. Inglis also received a Wes Nicol award through Carleton Entrepreneurs to explore commercialization of the technology. The project previously won the Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) competition this year.

With the cost of a modern myoelectric prosthetic hand in Canada ranging from $15,000 to $50,000, cost is a significant barrier to ownership for many amputees in Canada and abroad. Additionally, hand functionality is limited among these more moderately priced devices. Many of these hands only have the ability to open and close in a single grip. Higher functionality, such as independently actuated fingers capable of many grips comes at an even higher price.

The team focused on designing an afforable prosthetic with emphasis on the design of the mechanical hand, intelligent motor control logic, haptic feedback implementation, and integration of all of the individual system components into a functional prototype.

To develop an inexpensive electromechanical hand that was a reasonable analog of a human hand and an inexpensive EMG-based control  platform, the team decided that the mechanical hand components should be created using a 3D printer. The EMG control platform is comprised of inexpensive, readily available components.

The 3D-printed hand prototype was modeled, printed and assembled for less than $250. The hand contains over 30 components, including 15 unique printed components. It is actuated with high-torque hobby servos that are controlled by pulse width modulated (PWM) signals regulated by the microcontroller. The EMG interface works by acquiring differential signals from muscle impulses in the residual limb of the user. Those signals are then amplified, and passed to a high-resolution analog to digital converter (ADC). The ADC then outputs the signals over aserial peripheral interface (SPI) to the microcontroller. Control logic embedded in the microcontroller captures combinations of muscle impulses. A pressure sensor on the gripping surface of the prosthetic thumb provides feedback to the microcontroller to control the pressure applied when the prosthetic hand grips an object. A haptic feedback system creates vibration in response to a successfully received command.

The prosthetic hand is nimble when it comes to opening doors or picking up small items, such as eggs. It has a firm, but non-crushing grip.

The control system is customizable for each user. A child who receives her first myoelectric arm at the age of three will use a simple control scheme that requires one or two electrodes and only a single opcode. As the child grows, she will be able to incrementally increase the number of channels and the number of opcodes used, increasing the functionality of her hand.

Read the full report.

For the colleagues and alumni in attendance, the night was a chance to say thank you and to reconnect with the Carleton community. Almost $30,000 has been donated to help equip and transform a facility on campus with cutting-edge, high-frequency equipment that builds on the professors research areas. Gifts can still be made at futurefunder.ca.

More photos from the event.

The honorees

Miles A. Copeland, Professor Emeritus

Miles started his 31-year career in the Department of Electronics in 1965. In addition to serving as chair, his contributions to Carleton included building the research area of analog and radio frequency integrated circuit design, and incorporating such research into teaching. He worked on computing techniques and facilities to enable and reinforce research and teaching in this area.

Miles was very active in consulting and in research collaboration with industry, notably at Nortel, Bell Northern Research and General Electric. His widely used research innovations include groundbreaking work on switched capacitor filters that enabled precision on-chip filtering, and sigma-delta based fractional-N frequency synthesizers that enabled the design of fully integrated radios. Both were key to the design of modern telecommunications circuits, including personal communications devices (e.g., cell phones) and wireless data communications (e.g., WiFi).

He was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE in 1989.

Roy Boothroyd, Professor Emeritus

After working for a number of companies and universities, Roy joined the Department of Electronics in 1968, spending a number of years as chair. He was instrumental in starting the department’s active program of integrated devices and he helped to establish the unique microfabrication facility.

His research in the modeling of bipolar and field-effect transistor was internationally recognized and earned him the elevation to Fellow of the IEEE in 1969.

Roy spent many years as a consultant for Northern Telecom Electronics Ltd. in Ottawa in the field of device modeling for CAD. Some of the models he developed formed the basis for the simulation of modern semiconductor devices.

John P. Knight, Distinguished Research Professor

John joined Carleton University in 1967 and remained here until well after retirement. Most of the thousands of students who studied digital circuit design with him  remember him fondly as an inspiring and entertaining lecturer who was always willing to help them debug their circuits in the lab, sometimes late into the night.

His research in digital circuits focused on high-level synthesis, initially using heuristic and later evolutionary algorithms. In addition to developing the department’s digital circuits labs, John was one of the first teachers anywhere to introduce field-programmable gate arrays into his teaching, and he was a leading force on the bridge camp, an  intensive course offered in the Department of Electronics for new engineers in industry to learn about integrated circuit design.

J.S. Wight, Chancellor’s Professor

A Carleton graduate himself (MEng/74 and PhD/76), Jim has supervised more than 100 graduate students, always encouraging them to build something in the real world before graduation.

Over his profilic career of more than 35 years, Jim has authored or co-authored 42 refereed journal papers and 148 refereed conference papers, and has 23 issued patents.

Applying his radio and electronics engineering experience to more than academia, Jim has acted as a technical advisor/program director for many private-sector companies and has pursued joint research with Defence Research & Development Canada and the Communications Research Centre.

He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, and a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Left to right: Al Perks, PEng, Judge Convener; Tyler Clancy, student, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Frank Hendriksen, PEng, Student Papers Co-chair; Tim Inglis, student, Department of Electronics; Kim Eaton, PEng, Judge; Cynthia Cruickshank, assistant professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, PEO Student Papers Night Organizer

Congratulations to Tim Inglis (biomedical and electrical engineering) and Tyler Clancy (mechanical engineering) on their winning presentations at the PEO Papers Night on April 9. Inglis was awarded the best overall paper prize for the Bionic Hand and Clancy won for the best technical presentation for Flexures for the Formula Hybrid Car. The judges were significantly impressed both with the superb engineering technical aspects of their projects and their ability to present this to an audience in a fashion such that non-experts could understand their work.

Prof Cynthia Cruickshank, the faculty member responsible for the Carleton team, now has two consecutive wins after our team recaptured the Tom Foulkes Trophy, awarded by the Ottawa Chapter of PEO.

The Bionic Hand project, a 3D printed hand with intelligent EMG control, also took first place in the Department of Electronics, and second place in IEEE Ottawa Section – Carleton Branch.

Fellow membership in OSA is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics.

The Optical Society was founded in 1916 and is made up of more than 18,000 individuals from over 100 countries. It brings together optics and photonics scientists, engineers, educators, and business leaders.

Albert has held the Canada Research Chair in Advanced Photonic Components since his arrival at Carleton in 2004. His area of research deals with novel optical devices and systems for biomedical, industrial and environmental applications. He leads a large research team in close collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Chemistry, private companies, as well as several international research groups.

His team was recently awarded $600,000 by NSERC for his ground-breaking laser project titled MOSAIC (Multimodal Optical Sensor Applications, Interfaces, and Controls).

Albert also serves as the 2013 Chair of the Photonics North Conference.

The IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of fellow, the highest grade of membership, on those with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The IEEE Fellow is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement. Only 298 individuals have been elevated to IEEE Fellow for 2013.

“This is a significant recognition of the high-quality research that is done here at Carleton,” said Achar. “It is quite rewarding when your contributions are recognized by your peers. This gives me encouragement to serve my students, institution and profession with even more dedication.”

Achar’s research and innovations have significantly advanced computer-aided design methodologies for modelling and analysis of emerging high-speed, mixed-domain and multi-function electronic products. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and five chapters in different books. He is currently Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems society.  He is also guest editor for IEEE transactions on components, packaging and manufacturing technology (CPMT) for two special issues on Variability in Nanoscale Designs and 3D ICs and Interconnects. He was the general co-chair for the premier IEEE conference on high-speed design issues, the IEEE International Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems.

Achar and his students have won numerous awards for their innovations, including the prestigious NSERC doctoral medal, Carleton University Research Achievement Award and IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging Best Transaction Paper Award.

Taking a project from concept to commercial application is a long process. Tom Skinner is helping Carleton students get an early start.

Tom Skinner, MEng/72, has donated funds to run a two-year pilot project that will help engineering students begin to commercialize a fourth-year group project.

Capstone courses yield a constant stream of innovative projects. The challenge is capitalizing on that intellectual investment and moving it toward marketable solutions. By creating an intense summer fellowship program, a team of four students can refine and further develop a project with access to a technician and equipment.

“In grad school, or a fourth-year project, you finish up a project for grading and move on. I want students to have the chance to take it further—to take a term paper or project and develop it into something with a practical use,” he says.

Skinner himself did just that. He returned to university, working on his master’s degree initially as a part-time student, after working for Bell Northern Research, Nortel’s precursor.

“I needed to expand my engineering capability for what I wanted to do,” he says. “I never wanted to work for anybody. I wanted to be doing things for myself and making my own judgments. I wanted to test it out myself.”

After graduation, Skinner co-founded JSI Telecom, a manufacturer of equipment to intercept and analyze electronic transmissions. His ambition and love of the business led to more than 30 years of success. Now retired as chairman, Skinner can still be found in the Kanata office most days, acting as a corporate soundboard.

“I hope the commercialization summer fellowship helps develop the mindset that you’re not finished when you’ve solved the technical problems. You keep going,” Skinner says. “Solving problems is only a third of the way—it’s the start of a process to develop and bring a product to market.”

Taking MuscleMate farther

Polar, a heart-rate monitor manufacturer, turned a bulky medical device into a wireless, wearable personal fitness tool. Now a team of student inventors hopes to do the same for a muscle activity monitor.

As a tool for self-diagnosis or rehabilitation, the device, dubbed MuscleMate, could help people in physiotherapy to measure their progress, stroke victims to recover muscle function, body builders to target specific muscles, or amputees to control prosthetics.

“We proved the concept by using muscle signals to control a video game, but our product has potential beyond entertainment,” says team member Mark Klibanov.

“The commercial potential for the project is high, because the uses of the technology are so varied, and because there is no competing cost-effective solution in the marketplace yet,” says project supervisor Leonard MacEachern, associate professor of Electrical Engineering.

Amrita Sandhu and Mark Klibanov work on the proof-of-concept device that detects electrical signals generated by muscles in the wearer’s arm.

Klibanov, Musabbir Khan, Amrita Sandhu and Nick Stupich created MuscleMate for their fourth-year electrical engineering project. Worn like a blood-pressure cuff, Muscle­Mate uses electromyography (EMG) to detect tiny electrical signals generated by muscles in the wearer’s arm. Analog circuitry amplifies the signal and filters out atmospheric signals (such as from nearby lights). A microprocessor then converts the biological analog signal into a digital one, sending it wirelessly to a smartphone or computer. From there, gesture recognition software detects intensity and frequency of the impulses to determine strength and actions such as wrist turning. In the current video game application, relaxing and contracting the muscle bobs a helicopter over and under hazards.

After winning the Department of Electronics Best Presentation and Best Poster awards, the Carleton University IEEE Student Best Paper Award, and the Eastern Ontario Regional IEEE Student Best Paper Award, the MuscleMate team was chosen as the first recipient of the Carleton University Capstone Award. Thanks to the financial support of donor Tom Skinner, the Capstone Award will fund the MuscleMate team over the summer term to turn the project into a commercial venture.

“It would be hard to find a summer job where I could learn more than this,” says Stupich who, after investing about 40 hours a week into the project since January, is committed to see how far the team can take it. “The combination of working with hardware and software, of an electronics team on a biomedical project, was
appealing from the start. We’re making something genuinely cool.”

“My goal in conceptualizing capstone projects is to come up with projects that I wish I could have worked on for my final-year project!” says MacEachern. “Commercial potential and design economics are always a consideration, since we are doing real engineering design in these projects. This year the students have been given an excellent and truly amazing opportunity through the Capstone Award.”

For the team, the challenges over the summer include eliminating the sticky connections between the monitor and the user’s skin, and stream­lining the design—“The cuff needs to be clean enough to wear without looking like a cyborg,” says Stupich.

“Basically, everything needs to be made smaller,” says Klibanov. “At this intermediate stage of development, we can use larger components to prove reliability, but to go to market with a useable, competitive product, we need to replace the circuit board with a microchip.”

For the students, preparing to graduate and take on the opportunity of a start-up company is exciting. With MuscleMate’s novel gesture recognition and a price tag that currently is 10 times less than portable EMG systems, the young entrepreneurs are well positioned to make a commercial breakthrough.

“We’ve been given the chance to really go for it over the next four months,” says Stupich. “We want to get MuscleMate to market.”