Wright State graduate Justin Pelan ’13 ’16 sees the need for secure microelectronics every day. It is a need that has the U.S. defense industry rethinking its current supply chain and a need that has opened a new and promising future career field for engineering students.
“If a microelectronics design is not properly verified and vetted for bugs, major or minor, then hardware security is impossible to achieve,” Pelan said. “Potential adversaries will find any imperfection or flaws in a complex microelectronics design and exploit them to breach protected areas of memory or data.”
Pelan is an electronics engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory after previously working as a defense contractor. His undergraduate degree work at Wright State helped prepare him to be part of a team of new engineering professionals ready to meet the challenge of providing uniquely secure hardware for the Department of Defense.
“My Wright State degree provided me with a solid foundation due to the focus on Hardware Description Language (HDL) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs),” Pelan said.
The demand for engineers who can correctly assess trustworthiness and design secure hardware is increasing salaries and job security for Wright State graduates. The future applications are likely to extend far beyond the defense industry—part of the motivation for Wright State reworking its electrical and computer engineering curriculums to include advanced training in those skills.
“It is blatantly clear that microelectronics will have an astounding impact on our day-to-day lives in the near future,” Pelan said. “Our homes will be smart due to (Internet of Things) microelectronics in every appliance; our cars will drive us anywhere we please due to the high powered onboard processing of complex custom application-specific integrated circuits; and smart phones becoming more powerful every year as companies like Apple and Samsung continuously upgrade the microelectronics capabilities inside.”
One immediate need however, is to help the Armed Forces protect America by protecting its microelectronics from cyber attacks.
“The attack surface of microelectronics is growing at an alarming rate,” Pelan said. “High security microelectronics are expensive, but these breaches have real-world impacts.”
Engineering graduates who want their work to have a real-world impact will definitely have that opportunity in microelectronics—and many other fields.
“An electrical engineer with a background in microelectronics can go into almost any field or occupation they want,” Pelan said. “A firm understanding of the underlaying hardware makes for better programmers and better system engineers.”
