This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
The American Society for Engineering Education has given the John A. Curtis Award to John Nestor, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, for presenting the best paper at the Computers in Education Division session of its 2002 annual conference.
The paper describes applet software Nestor developed with Lafayette students to help their electrical and computer engineering peers master Computer-Aided Design. Applets are small programs that can be downloaded and run using an Internet browser. They read commands input by a user and send or receive the appropriate signals from a computer chip.
“Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) has revolutionized the design of electronic systems by enabling the design of integrated circuit ‘chips’ containing millions of transistors,” writes Nestor. “The design of VLSI chips requires the extensive use of Computer-Aided Design tools to create such large designs. Undergraduate electrical and computer engineering courses in VLSI Design typically teach the use of these tools to create designs, but provide little or no information about how the tools work.
“The goal of the CADAPPLETS project is to provide a set of Java animations which will aid students in visualizing the internal operation of these tools. These animations are available as Java applets which can be run from any web browser. This paper describes one set of animations that illustrates the operation of ‘placement’ tools, which assign VLSI modules to physical locations in a chip layout.”
Nestor’s applets are used in class presentations for Lafayette’s two senior-level electives in VLSI Design (VLSI Circuit Design and VLSI System Design) and are available on the Internet.
Students who have worked on the project include Farah Laiwalla ’03 (Karachi, Pakistan), who helped develop the applets as an EXCEL Scholar before graduating in May with a degree in electrical and computer engineering. EXCEL Scholar Volkan Oktem ’04 (Ankara, Turkey), a double major in electrical & computer engineering and economics & business, helped create an Internet-based system to test integrated circuit designs involving VLSI chips.
“[Professor Nestor] knows exactly what he’s doing, exactly what he expects of me, and has helped me significantly in understanding the material not just by devoting his time, but also by giving me very useful books,” Oktem said during the project.
Nestor has mentored several electrical and computer engineering majors in other research experiences as well. Last summer, for example, he led EXCEL Scholar Matthew Johnston ’03 (Nantucket, Mass.) in a project to configure the miniscule objects that make up a computer chip. Johnston built on that experience in an honors thesis this past school year by designing a chip for a more power-efficient amplifier that could be used in digital audio and digital subscriber lines (see related story).
EXCEL Scholar Marvin Marbell ’02 (Accra, Ghana) researched accelerated maze routing, a more efficient means of sending information along integrated computer circuits (see related story).
A senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 1991, Nestor’s prior honor for best conference paper was given for a presentation at the 22nd International Workshop on Microprogramming and Microarchitecture. He also has published his research in leading academic journals, and he serves as a technical reviewer for such journals, international and national conferences, book publishers, and the National Science Foundation.
He has played leadership roles in obtaining two National Science Foundation grants totaling about $188,000 and a grant from the Illinois Institute of Technology Education Research Initiative Fund.
He is a member of the Sigma Xi (scientific research), Eta Kappa Nu (electrical engineering), and Tau Beta Pi (engineering) honor societies. He also belongs to the Association for Computing Machinery and its Special Interest Group on Design Automation, and the American Society for Engineering Education. He is a program committee member of this year’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Microelectronics System Education.
Nestor joined the Lafayette faculty in 2000 after serving as associate professor and associate chair of computer engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he directed the computer engineering program from 1993-1995. He has been a research engineer at Intel Corporation in Aloha, Ore., and at Hewlett-Packard Corporation, in Cupertino, Calif.
He earned a Ph.D. and master’s degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987 and 1981, respectively, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1979.