CU's Kevin Kornegay honored by museum for accomplishments

By Briana Collins '03

To those who know him, it came as no surprise that Kevin Kornegay, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering since 1998, was selected by the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to be featured in an exhibit showcasing contributions made by black Americans in the field of information technology.

Kornegay

As part of the museum's annual Black Creativity Program, the exhibit included a biography of the multitalented Kornegay. The exhibit, which was on display from Jan. 17 through March 1, highlighted Kornegay's research efforts in such fields as "smart" power electronics, high-performance clocking, heterogeneous systems integration and, perhaps Kornegay's largest undertaking, his founding of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Laboratory (CBCRL) in 2000. The exhibit also explained the pivotal role he has played as adviser for the past four years to the Cornell student team for the annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition.

Among the items selected by the Chicago museum to illustrate Kornegay's accomplishments were the Cornell AUV team's submarine and a video recording of its underwater search for 17 objects at the event, held July 31 to Aug. 4, 2002, at the U.S. Navy's Spawar Transdec facility in San Diego, Calif. The Cornell AUV team finished a close second in the international competition.

"The majority of the schools involved are those with oceanography programs," noted Kornegay. "We don't have such a program at Cornell. What we do have are exceptional engineers."

Exceptional, indeed. CBCRL was the result of Kornegay's vision to develop a world-class research laboratory to "attract the best graduate students to use the latest technologies." The research effort addresses issues related to the design of high-performance circuits for wireless and wired-data communications.

Recently Kornegay led two groups of graduate students in the CBCRL program in a nationwide integrated-circuit design contest sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. Fifty-nine different groups competed in phase one, and only 15 were selected to move on to phase two. Both of Kornegay's teams made the cut, placing third, for the concept of a 10 gigabytes per second integrated optical transceiver, and fourth, for the idea of an adaptive, fully integrated, high-efficiency power amplifier for wireless communication.

Phase two of the competition will begin in May, when the groups can actually create their chips, test them, write their reports and send them to the judges. While the $25,000 reward is definitely a motivation, more important, Kornegay noted, the contest helps put CBCRL on the map as "one of the premier circuit design research programs in the country."

It's just this determination and drive to be the best that earned Kornegay recognition at the Chicago museum. But he prefers to turn the attention to his students, noting, "I've been blessed with an extraordinarily gifted group of graduate students. I will put them up against any group any day of the week."