The Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center (SSLEEC) at UC Santa Barbara is a new collaborative center, which partners key industry leaders and UCSB researchers to advance solid-state lighting and energy efficient power switching using wide-bandgap semiconductors. 

In 2005 the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) wrote a report entitled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which reflected on the fact that the US is not training enough engineers and physical scientists to replace those in the work force today. In many established companies, the average age of its employees is over 45. The generation of talent that won the space race and the Cold War is reaching retirement age and we are not producing the engineers and scientists that it will take to replace these soon-to-be retiring baby boomers

Severe battlefield and trauma injuries present unique problems in stemming blood loss, which is the primary cause of combat deaths. In extreme cases first responders may have less than two minutes to save a life. Recognizing the need to improve survivability for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy and Marine Corps evaluated a number of products to reduce uncontrolled bleeding.

Mentor Graphics is a leader in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Through their well-established products and services, they enable companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. EDA is a very competitive field where having the advantage of interacting with and attracting the best and brightest engineers will give a competitive edge. The Wilsonville, Oregon based company has been successfully engaged with the students and faculty of UC Santa Barbara for a number of years. Recently, Mentor Graphics went through a detailed exercise to rank U.S. universities they interact with. The results were used to determine their priorities for driving university research collaborations and targeted student recruiting in a cost effective manner.

What will computers look like in the future and how will they function? The answer to these questions could be the quantum computer, the most powerful computing device the world has ever known. But creating such a computer is no easy feat. One of the biggest challenges lies in the delicate temperament of the most basic component of the quantum computer: the qubit. In a conventional computer, transistors store bits of information and each bit has a value of either a 1 or 0. The power to motivate a bit is electricity. With a quantum computer, the classical bit gives way to a quantum bit, or qubit. Qubits are very sensitive to their environment, and are not stored in transistors; rather, they can be stored in a quantum mechanical state such as a photon polarization, electron spin, or in even more exotic degrees of freedom.