Haiyang ‘Henry’ Zhu. Click on the image to see the test he placed first in.

Clever circuit design has won Viterbi masters degree candidate Haiyang ‘Henry’ Zhu a $1000 first prize in a national competition.

Zhu, a native of Jiangsu, China who has a BS and MS from Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, participated in the Analog Devices annual student challenge test.

Zhu works with Mel Breuer, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering/Systems, on Breuer’s error-tolerant chips projects.  He has contributed to a design for testing memory chips for digital voice recorders, including creating an algorithm that doubled testing speed.

 

Zhu arrived at USC this year aa transfer student from the University of Iowa at Ames, He is principal author on three published papers, and associate author on a fourth.

 

Winning national prizes is not new to him. In China he placed first in national competitions in both chemistry and mathematics in 1995. 

 

 “Henry is a great student. I have had him in two of my classes and he is usually top of the class,” says Breuer. Zhu is on track to  receive his MS degree in May from the Viterbi School and “I wish he would stay here for a Ph.D,” says Breuer.

 

What will he do with the $1000 first prize? “I think tuition,” says Zhu.

 

According to its web site, “Analog Devices, Inc. (NYSE: ADI) is a world-leading semiconductor company specializing in high performance analog, mixed-signal, and digital signal processing integrated circuits. Since ADI was founded in 1965, its focus has been to solve the engineering challenges associated with signal processing in electronic equipment