Jonsson School Facilities

NSERL computer lab grad students cleanroom wallace lab

The Jonsson School features state-of-the-art classrooms and labs located in the 330,000-square-foot Engineering and Computer Science Complex and the 192,000-square-foot Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory building (NSERL). Faculty and students are also working increasingly with researchers at Dallas’s acclaimed UT Southwestern Medical Center, which features advanced biomedical labs containing the latest equipment and resources.

We understand that the most fertile areas for research often lie at the intersections of traditional disciplines, where the insights of people coming at problems from different perspectives frequently produce surprising and valuable results. The $85 million NSERL is tangible evidence of our belief in this philosophy, housing an array of engineers, physicists, chemists, microbiologists and their graduate students.

Specific facilities and capabilities

  • A large computer network featuring Sun workstations, servers and dedicated computers for research.
  • Specialized computer science labs for parallel processing, distributed systems, software engineering, high-performance computing, graphics, programming languages and systems, telecommunications, CAD and graph visualization, image understanding and processing, artificial intelligence, data mining, natural language processing, speech processing and Web technologies.
  • A class 10,000 microelectronics cleanroom for the fabrication and characterization of nanoscale materials and devices.
  • An electron beam lithography pattern generator capable of sub-micron resolution.
  • Plasma applications and science labs with facilities for mass spectrometry, microwave interferometry, optical spectroscopy, optical detection, in-situ ellipsometry and FTIR spectroscopy.
  • A gaseous electronics conference reference reactor for plasma processing and particulate generation studies.
  • A dual-wavelength (visible and near infrared) Gaertner ellipsometer for optical inspection of material systems.
  • Optical communications labs featuring attenuators, optical power meters, lasers, APD/p-i-n photodetectors, optical tables and couplers, plus a network of Sun workstations for the numerical simulation of optical transmission systems, optical routers and all-optical networks systems.
  • Equipment for the characterization, development and application of ultrafast dye and diode lasers.
  • Integrated circuits and systems labs equipped with a network of workstations, personal computers, FPGA development systems and prototyping equipment as well as a wide spectrum of the latest commercial and academic design tools to support graduate research in circuits and systems.
  • A dedicated network of hardware for analysis, design and simulation of image- and video-processing systems.
  • Facilities for the analysis and processing of speech signals.
  • Design and modeling tools for fiber and wireless transmission systems and networks plus all-optical packet routing and switching.
  • A design and evaluation environment for the study of telecommunication systems and wireless and optical networks, as well as facilities for designing network hardware, software, components and applications.
  • Facilities for carrying out research in enabling technologies for microelectronics and telecommunications, including nonlinear optics, Raman amplification in fibers, optical switching, applications of optical lattice filters, microarrays, integrated optics and optical networking.
  • Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab for 3-D digital recording of motion.