Associate professor Zhiyuan Yan is broadly interested in coding and modulation, wireless communications, large-scale integration design and implementation for communication and signal processing systems. Recently, Zhiyuan has been focused on improving data reliability through work in error correction coding -- and has been awarded an NSF grant, entitled High Performance Polar Decoders: Algorithm and Hardware Implementation, to support his efforts in this emerging area.
Error correction codes provide data reliability by guarding against possible errors, and are essential to modern digital storage and communications. Polar codes -- a recent theoretical breakthrough in the field -- are the first practical error correction codes that are asymptotically optimal in terms of channel capacity, and provide encoding and decoding complexity that makes them practical for many applications. Zhiyuan's research aims to devise new polar decoders that achieve superior error performance with reduced delay, low complexities, and efficient hardware implementations. He intends to tackle several key open research problems in this emerging field, and provide theoretical foundations for future research and application.
