Graduate Student Awarded Prestigious Fellowship
5-27-09

Skyler Weaver, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, has been awarded a Texas Instruments/Global Research Collaboration (GRC) Fellowship. Weaver is one of only 40 GRC fellows in the nation and the only one in the Pacific Northwest. The fellowship provides Weaver with tuition and fees, a monthly stipend, and an annual gift to the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for up to five years.

Weaver, who is from St. Helens, Oregon, earned an honors baccalaureate degree from OSU in electrical engineering in 2006. As a graduate student working under professor Un-Ku Moon, Weaver is conducting research in the analog/mixed signal group to synthesize analog-to-digital converters. “He is working on innovative architectures that are expected to be very amiable to CMOS scaling,” said Moon. “This is a novel task, as most people feel it is very difficult—if not impossible—to come up with a scalable analog-to-digital converter.”

Electronic devices have become smaller and smaller, much of it due to the development and advancement of digital circuits. Building analog circuits currently requires a great deal of research and expertise, and must be done by hand. Weaver is working on techniques to enable computers to design some of the circuits.

“Digital circuits can be built by computers, so more and more of the cost of electronic devices come from the analog circuits,” said Weaver. “The ultimate goal is to create new technology that will make devices that are smaller, less costly, more robust, and consume very little power.”

Weaver is no stranger to success. His senior design team won first place during the OSU Engineering Expo in 2006 and he held an Oregon Laurels graduate scholarship. He also garnered support from Tektronix for two years of graduate school.

The GRC Graduate Fellowship Program addresses the issues of improving educational opportunities at the doctoral level and supplying a relevantly educated work force for the semiconductor industry. GRC funds global pre-competitive research at university level to produce the next-generation technology for industry and develop the future leaders in science, engineering, and technology.