BIOGRAPHY
Richie is a fifth year graduate student working on his PhD in Professor Bernhard Boser's group. He has held positions with Hewlett-Packard, Oregon State University, and was a visiting researcher at the Technische Universitaet Kaiserslautern in Germany. In 2012, he was a finalist for the TSMC Outstanding Student Research Award. He is interested in high performance mixed-signal circuits, especially integrated circuits for MEMS.

Ultrasonic Depth Sensing on a Chip [BPN485]
Optical 3D imagers for gesture recognition, such as Microsoft Kinect, suffer from large size and high
power consumption. Their performance depends on ambient illumination and they generally cannot operate
in sunlight. These factors have prevented widespread adoption of gesture interfaces in energy- and
volume-limited environments such as tablets and smartphones. Gesture recognition using sound is an
attractive candidate to overcome these difficulties because of the potential for chip-scale solution
size, low power consumption, and ambient light insensitivity. Our research focuses on building a 2D
ultrasonic depth sensor system using batch-fabricated micromachined aluminum nitride (AlN) ultrasonic
transducer arrays and custom CMOS electronics. We have made significant progress towards this goal by
demonstrating a 2D rangefinder which measures distance and angle to objects up to 750mm away.