Illinois ECE

06/24/2026

Celebrating excellence in power and energy engineering.

This spring, the Annual Grainger Power Engineering Award Program recognized the importance of the power engineering field and honored the academic performance of the graduates. Congratulations to all of this year's recipients!

06/23/2026

The future of energy and healthcare innovation is being built in ECE 443.

Each spring, students in the LEDs and Solar Cells course are charged with applying what they have learned to tackle real-world challenges in two distinct project competitions. This year's award-winning designs explored breakthroughs in renewable energy generation and biomedical technology, demonstrating how engineering research can create meaningful impact far beyond the classroom.

Congratulations to this year's winners:
- ECE senior Robert Zhu
- Physics junior Cynthia Nolan

Read more: https://ece.illinois.edu/news/ece-443-awards-2026

06/22/2026

From a student-founded startup at University of Illinois to a company providing off-grid solar power to more than 50 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, Sun King's journey demonstrates the global impact ECE alumni can have through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Founded in 2008 by Grainger students (and an ECE alum) T. Patrick Walsh and Anish Thakkar (BS EE '07), Sun King is helping expand access to reliable, affordable electricity for underserved communities around the world. Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/635957a4-7212-45fa-a399-89e5cea867f6

Company’s off-grid energy infrastructure is used by more than 50mn customers across sub-Saharan Africa

06/22/2026

As demand for AI computing continues to surge, new chip architectures are emerging to challenge conventional approaches. ECE Professor Deming Chen shares his expertise to the Financial Times article. More: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-cerebras-ai-chips-stand-out-in-the-nvidia-dominated-market-155742216.html

Cerebras' chips are far different from Nvidia's, but both are designed to power AI data centers.

06/18/2026

A year worth celebrating.

📊 707 graduates across five degree programs
🏆 105 scholarships, fellowships, and awards presented
💰 $1.6 million awarded to ECE students

These numbers represent the achievements, perseverance, and excellence of our students throughout the 2025-26 academic year.

06/17/2026

ECE 469 gives students the opportunity to apply classroom concepts through hands-on engineering experiences. With the new Audio Amplifier Lab, students design, build, and test their own amplifiers while gaining practical skills in measurement, debugging, and system performance. The experience prepares graduates for industry by connecting theory with the challenges engineers face in the real world.

Read more: https://ece.illinois.edu/news/industry-ready-ece-469-preps-students

This year, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign introduced a new Audio Amplifier Lab for ECE 469, allowing for hands-on opportunities that bridge the gap between theory and implementation.

06/16/2026

One paper. One selection. One of the field's highest honors.

ECE Professor Deming Chen has been inducted into the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA)’s Technical Committee on Field-programmable Gate Array (TCFPGA) Hall of Fame.

The honor is extraordinarily selective. While any FPGA paper published more than 10 years ago can be considered, only one is selected annually for this recognition, underscoring the exceptional impact and lasting influence of the work.

Read more: https://ece.illinois.edu/news/deming-chen-tcfpga-hall-of-fame

06/12/2026

ECE Professor Katherine Driggs-Campbell and her team developed a new multimodal manipulation framework that helps robots better combine vision, touch, and other sensory inputs.

Learn more: https://csl.illinois.edu/news-and-media/new-computational-approach-enhances-multi-modal-manipulation
Explore audio, photos, and videos of the work: https://policyconsensus.github.io/

06/12/2026

For 17 years, the Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI) has provided students with a unique opportunity to lead, learn, and contribute to the future of energy research.

Organized entirely by students, PECI 2026 welcomed nearly 140 attendees from academia and industry for two days of technical presentations, keynote talks, networking, and collaboration. As the Midwest's longest-running, student-run power and energy conference, the event continues to help develop the next generation of leaders in energy, sustainability, and electrification.

Read more: https://ece.illinois.edu/news/peci-2026-generating-current-for-future-generations

06/10/2026

ECE Founder Professor Cunjiang Yu was named a recipient of the 2026 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Materials Division Centennial Mid-Career Award for the pioneering contributions in soft and stretchable electronics and their associated fundamental aspects of materials, mechanics, and device technologies.