Asadi Works to Make X-Ray Imagery Less Noisy

X-ray technology is by now familiar to all—its uses in capturing high-quality images of small components such as bones and teeth are taken for granted these days. A less well-known use of the technology is the detailed analysis of semiconductor chips.

ECE researcher Dr. Navid Asadi knows something about X-ray analysis of semiconductors—as director of the SCAN Lab and associate director of the Micro-Electronics Security Training (MEST) Center, he is an expert in using X-ray imaging (along with a whole host of other tools) to determine whether a semiconductor chip is what it is supposed to be.

But, there’s a problem. Current X-ray machines often produce images with significant noise and poor resolution when dealing with intricately shaped parts. A newly funded NSF project aims to change that. Dr. Asadi recently received $2.6M of funding from the National Science Foundation for “Track 2 Acquisition of a Novel Performance-Driven 3D Imaging System for Extremely Noisy Objects (NPIX).”

Asadi and his collaborators, Dr. Mark Tehranipoor (ECE), Dr. Alina Zare (ECE), Dr. Michele Manuel (MSE), and Dr. Reza Forghani (College of Medicine) intend to create an advanced system that addresses these limitations. The NPIX system will be able to capture images of objects with complex geometries while doing so with minimal noise.

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