Curt Schurgers

Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Energy efficient wireless embedded systems with research thrusts including digital electronic circuits, VLSI system design, digital communications, wireless systems, digital signal processing, and networked systems.

Professor Schurgers' research focuses on truly networked embedded systems, rather than standalone embedded devices. But in order to achieve the promise of ubiquitous access and sensor-based information gathering, Schurgers is working on technology for energy management in these systems. Today, energy consumption is dominated by wireless communication and less by data processing. Schurgers is tackling energy spent in wireless communication through the use of radio power management. Schurger's work seeks to identify how to utilize the available radio resources efficiently. He has developed a comprehensive framework for managing the radios and adapting their settings in the presence of variations in traffic load, channel behavior and overall network conditions. Specifically, Schurgers has developed two techniques : a radio shutdown and wakeup approach for short-range systems, and energy-aware wireless packet scheduling that exploits radio-level adaptation in longer range wireless links. Schurgers' work also includes verification through system implementation, and wireless ad-hoc networks and sensor networks.

Capsule Bio:
Curt Schurgers received his Ph.D. from UCLA in integrated circuits and systems. Before coming to UCSD in 2002, Schurgers was a lecturer at UCLA in VLSI System Design, and held research assistantships at UCLA Networked & Embedded Sysytems Lab and the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center in Belgium. Schurgers has been published in five journals and has presented 15 conference papers. He has filed one patent titled "Method and system architecture for turbo decoding," and is a reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Communications.