Admissions to to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are handled through a central admission process. If you are seeking financial support for your graduate studies it is useful to understand what the individual research groups are doing. With such background knowledge you may want to contact specific faculty members and engage them in a constructive discussion. Blanket letters that show no understanding what the research group does are not very helpful to the faculty member.
The klimeck research group is focused on the building, using, and deployment of nanoelectronic modeling and simulation codes. Prof. Klimeck has focussed in his career at Texas Instruments, NASA JPL, and now Purdue on the construction of NEMO 1-D and NEMO 3-D. With the advent of massively parallel computing we have begun to scale these two codes to 23,000 and 8,192 cores/CPUs.
We are under way to build the next generation code in the group codenamed OMEN - NEMO backwards - one more time, now in 1D, 2D, and 3D.... It will combine the non-equilibrium transport capabilities of NEMO 1-D and the multimillion atom electronic structure capabilities of NEMO 3-D into one new exciting code.
All of these kind of developments are ultimately delivered to users through the nanoHUB.org website. For example the NEMO3-D code has an educational version that runs on the nanoHUB as the quantum dot lab A flash demo is available . Other tools that do transport or atomistic calculations and have been used by hundreds of people already are the bandstructure lab, the nanowire lab , and the nanoFET lab:
Presentation material like "Bandstructure in Nanoelectronics", "Atomistic Alloy Disorder in Nanostructures", and "Quantum Dots" help users to understand the nanomaterial better and might give you an idea of what work is being done in the group. Each of these materials and simulation tools have been used by hundreds of users.
Overall the nanoHUB has been used by over 50,000 people in 172 countries in the the year 2007 alone. 5,800 people ran over 200,000 simulations.
I think Purdue is one of the very the best places in the world right now to study theoretical electron transport at the nanometer scale. The nanoHUB is an opportunity for students to impact the rest of the world and have an outcome with their PhD thesis that goes beyond a few papers. At Purdue we have 4 theory / modeling professors: Datta, Lundstrom, Alam, and Klimeck.
The Klimeck group is the one primarily focused on model building, numerical developments, and parallel computing. As you consider graduate school and applying to this group ask yourself: