Nagulu Is New ECE Faculty at Oakland Campus and Part of Institute for NanoSI
Assistant Professor Aravind Nagulu the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in January 2025. He is based at the Oakland, California campus and his research focuses on application-specific integrated circuits. He is part of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern.
Aravind Nagulu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, joined the College of Engineering in January 2025 at the Oakland, California campus and will be part of the research team at Northeastern’s bicoastal Institute for NanoSystems Innovation.
Nagulu has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for “Cryogenic-CMOS and Superconducting Circuits for Scalable Quantum Systems.” He is investigating how to address limitations in the hardware infrastructure of quantum computing by developing energy-efficient, low-cost, and compact cryogenic chips that will enable scaling quantum systems to support thousands of qubits.
Additionally, Nagulu, in collaboration with Duke University, Oregon State University, and the University of Notre Dame, is the recipient of an $800,000 NSF grant for “NewSpectrum: Enabling Dense and In-Situ Spectrum Monitoring via Analog Correlators and Circuits-System Co-Design.”
A former assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Nagulu initially will be teaching undergraduate and graduate-level microwave engineering.
Nagulu’s research focuses on analog, RF, and millimeter-wave integrated circuits and systems, analog computing, biomedical scanners, and hardware for large-scale quantum computing systems. He has received numerous awards since graduating in 2021 from Columbia University with a PhD in analog design.
He was a recipient of the IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award (First Place) in 2018, the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award 2018-2019, the ISSCC Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2019, the IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship in 2019, an IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Finalist nomination in 2020, the Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award in 2021, Eli Jury Award from Columbia, EE in 2022, and the NSF CAREER award in 2024.
Nagulu has also authored or co-authored several papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Physical Review X, IEEE JSSC, IEEE TMTT, IEEE ISSCC, IEEE RFIC, IEEE CICC and IEEE IMS.
He says his passion for hardware design began the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, where he graduated with B. Tech in electrical engineering and a M. Tech in microelectronics and very-large-scale-integration (VLSI).
Currently, he is engaged in the design and development of application-specific integrated circuits for a range of applications, including indoor/automotive radar systems, medical imaging, and quantum computing.
“These fine-tuned integrated circuits will open up the possibilities for new applications that would otherwise not be possible,” Nagulu says. “They can also improve current applications by orders of magnitude.”
Because of their small size, the integrated circuits will also enable the development of smaller devices that will consume less power and cost less.
As an example, Nagulu is conducting research on an integrated circuit that could power a hand-held eye scanner to gather important data on eye health in just a few seconds. Currently, scanning devices are bulky stationary equipment in a doctor’s office, and the scanning process can take more than a minute. With the development of application-specific chips and hand-held scanners, the eye scanners will be radically improved, especially for children and elderly who are challenged to remain still for scans.
“We believe this could greatly help a child’s health and eye care monitoring in general,” Nagulu says.
Another research focus is application-specific chips for low-cost, low-power radar systems. Nagulu says one application would apply to radar systems in cars that can experience performance degradation if they are in highly trafficked areas.
“In that kind of environment, the radar system performance significantly drops,” Nagulu says. “We are developing systems that are robust enough so that many radars within a small area can co-exist.”
Additionally, he says a goal is to reduce a radar system’s power consumption to enable the development of more mobile devices.
Nagulu says he was drawn to Northeastern because of the collaborative atmosphere. He hopes to conduct interdisciplinary work with other Northeastern departments and institutes, including the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things.
“I think the amount of collaboration at the NanoSI institute will bring cross-disciplinary research to the forefront. Being in a location such as Oakland, which is so close to Silicon Valley, will enable us to work very effectively with industry on exciting semiconductor projects,” Nagulu says.