Research

The WEST Lab is always looking for outstanding new members to make contributions. If the projects on this site sound like a good fit for you, feel free to drop me an email at ude.xdp ta ttenrubd.

At the Master's level, I am happy to advise those students who will commit to completing a thesis. Note that research assistantship funding is typically reserved for PhD students; research grants typically last 3-5 years and it can take 1-2 years of training before a student can contribute to the deliverables required by the grant providing student funding. Master's degrees are most commonly funded through teaching assistantships and employer programs.

Current lab members

WEST Lab group meetings are held weekly at a time adjusted to fit schedules every quarter. Send me an email at the address above if you'd like to join a meeting.

Luis Brennan

Master's thesis student and 2022 URMP scholar

Project Title: Electrically Small Antennas for single chip mote wireless sensor networks

Project Description: Using single chip motes for wireless sensor networks dramatically lowers the scale factor and expense for network nodes. This improvement in scale factor however poses serious problems especially regarding antenna design for common RF communication protocols like 2.4 GHz Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) whose free space wavelength is well over 10 times the size of a single chip mote. This study will design and investigate various electrically small antenna designs in order to quantify the effectiveness of less than ideal configurations constrained by planar width, surface area, and volume. Specifically a variety of PCB based and wire antenna configurations with a variety of sizes will be simulated, built and tested.

Biography: Luis Brennan is pursuing a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in RF communication systems after receiving a Bachelors in Physics from the University of Chicago. His family has a saying, "better life through RF," and he aims to use his appreciation for the subtleties of electro-dynamics to create and improve socially impactful technologies.

Richard Atherton

Part-time MS Thesis student, 2023 - Present

Design of integrated circuits for hydrophone receivers

Stephen Weeks

Part-time MS Thesis student, 2023 - Present

Design of integrated sensor interface circuits

Hayden Galante

Master's thesis student co-advised with Dr. Atul Ingle, PSU CS

Techniques for high-efficiency single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras

Quinn Morgan

PSU-ENSTA Internship Awardee

Signal processing for improved signal recovery during wireless reception with integrated CMOS oscillators

Jacob Louie

Undergraduate research intern, Summer 2022 - Present

The Single-Chip micro-Mote (SCuM) project is a highly complex, fully-integrated CMOS System-on-Chip. Such a complex system can be used in many applications but we need to understand how it performs in the real world. Jacob has been working on techniques to facilitate more effective use of SCuM, including profiling current consumption in various operational modes, establishing best practices for developing and testing on-chip firmware.

Natalie Kashoro

Undergraduate, 2023 LSAMP scholar, 2023 Frankwell Lin scholar, Fall 2022 - Present

Standards-Compatible Network Stacks on the Single-Chip micro Mote

Brandon Hippe

Undergraduate research intern, Summer 2022

Brandon designed a low-cost humidity test chamber inspired by Eric Paulos's student Rundong Tian at UC Berkeley. After finishing the design and ordering parts, he built a DC probe system in the WEST Lab and doing curve tracing of 65 nm MOSFETs fabricated as part of a CMOS oscillator test structure IC. These results will help us understand postprocessed CMOS dice that have undergone etching at UW's Washington Nanofabrication Facility.

Project ideas

The research I'm interested in can benefit from a wide array of skills from analog integrated circuit design, to creating new digital systems on FPGAs, to writing C code to run on microcontrollers. As an example, below are active projects I'm recruiting for via URMP and my RLC statement for BUILD EXITO. If you're interested in working on one of these projects or something like it, send me an email (ude.xdp ta ttenrubd) or drop by my office hours!

Analog frontend (AFE)

Title: On-chip AFE for three-terminal electrochemical sensor chronoamperometry

Description: We have demonstrated our single-ended analog frontend (AFE) to be useful for two-terminal potentiometric sensors (e.g., to sense ion species like sodium) but it lacks the ability to interface with the working, reference, and counter electrode in three-terminal electrochemical sensors (e.g., to perform chronoamperometry on enzymes like lactate). We need a student to design a three-terminal integrated circuit AFE capable of applying potential to an electrochemical sensor and measuring resultant current. Measurement will likely consist of converting to voltage and passing output to existing on-chip sensor ADC. This AFE is intended to be integrated alongside, and controlled by firmware running on, our fully-integrated wireless sensor mote platform.

Useful skills: Analog circuit design, mixed-signal integrated circuit design, interest in electrochemical sensing techniques. It may be that this design will take place at the schematic level only for now, but experience with IC layout would help propel the project even further.

Bluetooth tools

Title: Bluetooth Low Energy PHY/MAC Emulator

Description:Breaking the boundaries of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) power consumption requires development of a custom silicon BLE RF controller. We need a prototyping tool to allow bit-by-bit construction and deconstruction of BLE packets to enable flexible development of in-silicon logic before committing to chip fabrication. We have successfully demonstrated construction and transmission of raw RF packets but existing equipment is too slow for more advanced communication requiring timed responses to received packets. The proposed tool must be able to respond to real BLE devices in real time to establish standards-compatible connections, so such a system will likely be comprised of an FPGA and RF frontend.

Useful skills: Verilog, hardware prototyping, electronics test equipment, FPGA and microcontroller programming would all be great. Verilog and FPGA experience are particularly key for the student to make meaningful progress.

Digital sensor interface

Title: Particle sensor interface to wireless sensor mote

Description: Our millimeter-scale wireless system needs sensors to do useful tasks and recent wildfires have underscored the utility of particle sensors to quantitatively monitor air pollution. We're seeking a student to write embedded code on our chip-scale platform to operate a commercial particle sensor with the end goal of transmitting sensor data wirelessly through an established mesh network.

Useful skills: Embedded systems and C programming are key skills on this project. It would be great if the student is also already familiar with the ARM Cortex M0, and UART/RS-232/serial communication and handling of its interrupts.

BUILD EXITO lab summary

David began pursing millimeter-scale sensor systems as part of his PhD at UC Berkeley. Prior to his PhD, David focused predominantly on PCB-scale sensor systems for oceanographic applications during his Masters and while a member of technical staff at Sandia National Labs. This work gave him the opportunity to do science on research vessels, run long-duration coastal experiments, and travel to Antarctica to pilot underwater robots. These experiences supported his affinity for engineering in pursuit of scientific objectives. Now an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at PSU, his research goals include pushing the boundaries of tiny wireless devices capable of communicating using, e.g., Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and suitable for small-scale applications such as implantation in the human body. The skills relevant to his work run the gamut from hardware to software and can benefit from a wide array of skills including analog integrated circuit design, to creating new digital systems on FPGAs, to writing C code to run on microcontrollers. Students interested in a variety of flavors of electrical engineering, or adjacent fields, can be successful contributors.

Past Students & Other WEST Lab Associates