Ashraf Wadaa defended his dissertation in Wireless Sensor Networks under Professor Stephan Olariu in 2005. He joined Logic Technology Development group (LTD) at Intel Corporation in January 2005. LTD is the R&D arm for the Technology Manufacturing Group. LTD conducts the research and development of new technology for both the next generation silicon manufacturing process, and the corresponding techniques, tools, and systems for automating this process. An intrinsic part of LTD efforts is performing engineering analysis to assess performance, reliability, and yield of the next generation process under development. Over the past year, Ashraf has been involved in the design and development of an Engineering Analysis Framework. The goal is to leverage component reuse using a set of common components for Database Access, Statistical Analysis, and Visualization, to support diverse Engineering Analysis applications. Ashraf and his team have a patent pending for a generic subsystem that enables dynamic specification, integrated access, and complex correlation of multi-source data to enable manufacturing excursion troubleshooting through the framework services. In addition, Ashraf 'owns' a repository system for managing Access to data generated from electrical testing of silicon wafers in the Fab; and subsequently from various engineering tests performed on Dice cut from these wafers to determine functional properties of individual microprocessor chips.. The system has a user base of 4000+, including 'Process Engineers' accessing data through various Analysis applications. Real-time containment of operational interruptions to data loading and data retrieval from this system is a key requirement. Ashraf relates that "Applying the thinking out of the box, strongly advocated and exercised in the wireless sensor network group to tackle unconventional problems, paid dividends in his work. Instead of intercepting typical operational problems related to 'bad' data at the time of user access to the data, Ashraf proposed an en-route certification mechanism for individual test result files. Files are injected into the file stream en route to the data repository, concurrently the event is notified at the repository and a certificate for the file is applied for at the destination checkpoint. An arriving file is allowed to pass through the checkpoint to be processed by loaders only if a certificate is on hand for the file, other wise the file is rejected. This saves wasted resources in loading and storing 'bad' data. The scheme effectively creates a certified corridor for file flow that incurs minimal file routing delays (a concept inspired by secure corridors Dr. Olariu and the Wireless Sensor Network group at ODU researched in the context of sensor network applications)".
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