Four professors who made a lasting impact on the Departmetnof Electronics and their students were celebrated on at a special dinner on April 13. Miles Copland, Jim Wight, John Knight and Roy Boothroyd (in absentia) were honoured for their leadership and innovation in founding and shaping the department, forging ties between industry and academia, and elevating Carleton’s research enterprise to the international stage.
For the colleagues and alumni in attendance, the night was a chance to say thank you and to reconnect with the Carleton community. Almost $30,000 has been donated to help equip and transform a facility on campus with cutting-edge, high-frequency equipment that builds on the professors research areas. Gifts can still be made at futurefunder.ca.
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More photos from the event.
The honorees
Miles A. Copeland, Professor Emeritus
Miles started his 31-year career in the Department of Electronics in 1965. In addition to serving as chair, his contributions to Carleton included building the research area of analog and radio frequency integrated circuit design, and incorporating such research into teaching. He worked on computing techniques and facilities to enable and reinforce research and teaching in this area.
Miles was very active in consulting and in research collaboration with industry, notably at Nortel, Bell Northern Research and General Electric. His widely used research innovations include groundbreaking work on switched capacitor filters that enabled precision on-chip filtering, and sigma-delta based fractional-N frequency synthesizers that enabled the design of fully integrated radios. Both were key to the design of modern telecommunications circuits, including personal communications devices (e.g., cell phones) and wireless data communications (e.g., WiFi).
He was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE in 1989.
Roy Boothroyd, Professor Emeritus
After working for a number of companies and universities, Roy joined the Department of Electronics in 1968, spending a number of years as chair. He was instrumental in starting the department’s active program of integrated devices and he helped to establish the unique microfabrication facility.
His research in the modeling of bipolar and field-effect transistor was internationally recognized and earned him the elevation to Fellow of the IEEE in 1969.
Roy spent many years as a consultant for Northern Telecom Electronics Ltd. in Ottawa in the field of device modeling for CAD. Some of the models he developed formed the basis for the simulation of modern semiconductor devices.
John P. Knight, Distinguished Research Professor
John joined Carleton University in 1967 and remained here until well after retirement. Most of the thousands of students who studied digital circuit design with him remember him fondly as an inspiring and entertaining lecturer who was always willing to help them debug their circuits in the lab, sometimes late into the night.
His research in digital circuits focused on high-level synthesis, initially using heuristic and later evolutionary algorithms. In addition to developing the department’s digital circuits labs, John was one of the first teachers anywhere to introduce field-programmable gate arrays into his teaching, and he was a leading force on the bridge camp, an intensive course offered in the Department of Electronics for new engineers in industry to learn about integrated circuit design.
J.S. Wight, Chancellor’s Professor
A Carleton graduate himself (MEng/74 and PhD/76), Jim has supervised more than 100 graduate students, always encouraging them to build something in the real world before graduation.
Over his profilic career of more than 35 years, Jim has authored or co-authored 42 refereed journal papers and 148 refereed conference papers, and has 23 issued patents.
Applying his radio and electronics engineering experience to more than academia, Jim has acted as a technical advisor/program director for many private-sector companies and has pursued joint research with Defence Research & Development Canada and the Communications Research Centre.
He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, and a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
