Stony Brook University Electrical and Computer Engineering

Chair Hong and President Arthur Lee at the Farewell Ceremony   The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at SUNY Korea extends its sincere appreciation to Professor Sangjin Hong for his dedicated service and leadership as the Founding Chair of the ECE Department.   Since the official establishment of the ECE Department in Spring 2022, Professor Hong has served as the Chair of the department, playing a pivotal role in building and shaping its foundation. Through his vision, leadership, and commitment, he has contributed significantly to the growth and development of the department, fostering an environment of academic excellence and supporting the success of students and faculty.   His dedication and contributions have left a lasting legacy within the SUNY Korea ECE community. The department sincerely thanks Professor Hong for his invaluable service and leadership and wishes him continued success and happiness in his future endeavors.   Thank you, Professor Hong, for your dedication and for helping establish and strengthen the foundation of SUNY Korea ECE.

  “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”― Nora Ephron   Welcome and Welcome Back our deary ECEers! Fall is just around the corner! Even though we are not in New York City, ECE's newly joined faculty members Dr. Lee and Dr. Yoon, along with Department Chair, Dr. Sangjin Hong, Dr. Bradter, and Ms. Huang, welcomed all ECE students with warm words, pizza, and classic Korean Fried Chicken!       Today, Fall 23 Freshmen students got the opportunities to introduce themselves to the department, and to exchange information with their mentor buddy students for a fruitful start of the college life!   < Freshmen Self-Introduction> Current students are also thrilled to see and catching up with their fellow ECE friends after summer vacation, exchanging ideas for class schedules and their campus experiences with each other.     Go! History Makers! Study hard and play hard for this brand new semester! Welcome to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering!

GO! History Makers, We Change the World!   The Spring has finally cme! This March, we have just had our First Department Gathering held in our very own ECE Department Study Room! It was a great lunch hour for both new comers and current students to get to know what to expect for their university life while searching for deep knowledge towards becoming a professional Electrical Engineer.  Welcome to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering!              

Prof. Emre Salman and doctoral candidate Ivan Miketic recently published a unique obfuscation technique to make digital computer chips more resistant to reverse engineering.  Why is this important?  One of the key security issues for chip design companies is reverse engineering. Reverse engineering involves several physical attacks to the chip to regenerate the circuit netlist.  The “netlist” is the description of a circuit including the gates, inputs, outputs and their interconnections.  Once the netlist is obtained, counterfeit designs that are not authentic can be fabricated. This is typically referred to as Intellectual Property (IP) theft. Reverse engineering poses a significant economic risk to the semiconductor industry due to lost profits and reputation. It also presents a considerable risk to consumers and private data. The research community has actually developed several obfuscation techniques to protect circuits against reverse engineering or make reverse engineering attacks more difficult. These techniques, however, typically introduce significant overhead such as additional chip area and power consumption. In their work, Salman and Miketic leverage adiabatic circuits and some of their unique characteristics to develop a novel circuit obfuscation technique. The protected circuit is highly resistant against reverse engineering attacks with minimal overhead.   Indeed, attackers can come up with advanced formal techniques to diminish the efficacy of circuit obfuscation techniques. Thus, the main objective of the research community is to make these attacks increasingly more difficult. Since the Stony Brook’s team approach relies on adiabatic operation, most of these advanced formal attack methods do not yet exist for these kinds of circuits.  Salman and Miketic believe that their recent paper will contribute to the emergence of new research topics at the intersection of adiabatic circuits and reverse engineering.The Stony Brook University team’s method is lightweight, meaning that it has much less overhead than conventional obfuscation techniques, while still achieving a high degree of protection against reverse engineering. The proposed technique is also more resistant to some of the advanced attacks since it is based on adiabatic circuits. These kinds of circuits are different than conventional approaches as they rely on certain phase differences among the gates for correct operation. Salman and Miketic use those phase differences in their technique to their advantage to obfuscate the circuit netlist. Thus, even though a reverse engineer uses sophisticated techniques to obtain the layout of the chip, they cannot figure out the real netlist without knowing what the true phase differences are.  How would the approach be used in practice?  First, the digital circuit needs to be designed based on adiabatic principles rather than conventional static CMOS. There is limited design automation capability for such circuits. However, not the entire chip needs to be adiabatic, only the parts of the chip that need the most protection. It can even be possible to have these blocks ready as hard IP (i.e. already designed so it can be ‘inserted’ into the chip). Since Prof. Salman has had industry sponsorship for this research, he already sees some interest in adapting this idea for the security layer of the chip. Prior to this project, Salman and Miketic had already been working on adiabatic circuits. As part of another project, they developed a method to use adiabatic circuits in RF-powered applications to achieve an order of magnitude reduction in power consumption. As they gained a deeper understanding of the operating principles of adiabatic circuits, they intuitively thought that it would bring some interesting advantages in the field of hardware security. When Prof. Salman and Ivan Miketic first had the idea, they were excited about it as it was a very different approach than existing techniques and had the promise to deliver good results.  As they started working on it, they faced several difficult issues to overcome, which they didn’t anticipate at the beginning. The research infrastructure Prof. Salman has in his lab as well as close communication with his students helped facilitate this research. The Salman and Miketic paper was published at IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems in May 2021 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9440196 .  This research was co-funded by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

Continually increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have already led to changes in the climate as well as the acidification of the oceans. This increased acidity of the oceans is analogous to a slow motion “spill” of acid. And just like we clean up after oil spills, we need to clean up this acid spill as well. Professor Matthew Eisaman The approach of ECE’s Prof. Matthew Eisaman and a team of researchers, called  SEA MATE, which stands for Safe Elevation of Alkalinity for the Mitigation of Acidification Through Electrochemistry, uses carbon-free electricity and electrochemistry to effectively pump this excess acid out of the ocean and then sells the acid for useful purposes. This acid removal restores the ocean chemistry such that the remaining ions in the ocean react with atmospheric carbon dioxide, safely locking it up for 10,000 – 200,000 years as oceanic bicarbonate. So the net effect of SEA MATE is the reversal of ocean acidification along with the net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is very likely that early deployments will be in partnership with existing marine industries such as seawater desalination, aquaculture, maritime transport, and offshore wind. As an example, performing the SEA MATE process on the waste effluent from desalination plants would provide value to the desal plants by reducing its environmental impact, while also mitigating ocean acidification and decreasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For SEA MATE to make a significant impact at a global scale, it needs to be low-cost and have no negative environmental impacts. SEA MATE aims to achieve this by simplifying the process to its bare essentials and focusing on restoring, not changing, ocean chemistry. The research and testing over the next year is designed to verify SEA MATE’s electrochemical performance, its safety for marine life, and its cost.  If all goes well, commercialization will likely start in around a year from now. SEA MATE is led by Prof. Eisaman at Stony Brook University, and the Stony Brook group is responsible for the technology development and testing. His colleague Dr. Brendan Carter at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is leading the modeling effort. Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (SoMAS) Ph.D. student Nathan Hirtle is a research assistant on the project helping with experiments to quantify the seawater chemistry of the process. The team is also in the process of hiring one postdoc at Stony Brook and another at the University of Washington. In addition, the team has contracted with a wide array of organizations to help with topics such as the techno-economic analysis, life cycle analysis, and integration with existing marine industries, among others. PhD student Nathan Hirtle at Flax Pond Marine Lab. This project is made possible by the vision and support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Importantly, through a partnership between the Grantham Foundation and Ocean Visions, Inc., SEA MATE has been paired with a world-class team of technical advisors who are providing critical feedback and really allowing the team to turbocharge their research and development process. Prof. Eisaman’s training is in physics and he is a professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). Part of the project will take place using facilities and students from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS). As mentioned, Prof. Eisaman is hiring a postdoc who ideally has experience with both engineering and oceanography.  Prof. Eisaman’s personality and research interests have always been very interdisciplinary, as is the SEA MATE project itself. Stony Brook has certainly accommodated this approach. Prof. Eisaman been working on research related to this topic for about ten years. He thinks we are now at the point where the technology readiness and the societal need make the deployment of processes like SEA MATE feasible.  This is indeed excellent environmental news.