SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: Design, simulate, build and test an electronic printed circuit board.
Potential skills gained: Basic electronic development process, including circuit board layout and simulation.
Required qualifications or skills: Yes, it is intended for ECE students with hardware design focus. The student will extensively be running computer aided design tools such as Eagle PCB and Mentor Graphics.
Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.
Research Areas
Dr. Tran, a professor in the practice at Rice University in Houston, Texas, earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Houston in 2001. In addition to being a professor at Rice where he is teaching high-speed systems design, Tran is a senior principal SI/PI engineer at Raytheon Technologies. Prior to Raytheon, he was an engineering technologist at Dell Technologies and Compaq Computer Corporation (acquired by HP), a chief technical advisor at Halliburton Co. and a CTO/senior engineering manager of New Emerging End Equipment in DSP Systems at Texas Instruments. Tran had also been involved with 4 technology startups, one of which was based on his doctoral research in spread spectrum clock distribution methods. Tran holds 40 granted patents related to high-speed interconnects, computer power management, virtual reality, computer gaming/audio systems, PC-Based HDTV, oil and gas high bitrate telemetry systems, fiber optic communication and mixed analog/digital ASICs. He is a senior Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) member, has written two books and published more than 24 technical papers.
