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
- Amelia Ritger (Visiting PhD student, Hofmann Lab @ UCSB)
- Dr. Tarak Arbi (Visiting postdoctoral scholar, ENSTA Paris)
- Jeff Roman (MS project student, now at Apple)
- Ronaldo Leon (Ugrad research intern 2022)
- Rob Torres (Ugrad 2022 and 2022 LSAMP scholar)
- Stephen Short (Ugrad and 2021 URMP scholar, Master's student, 2021 URMP scholar, Winner of 2022 ECE Dept Outstanding Undergraduate Student, Winner of Best Paper at IEEE UEMCON 2022 in the VLSI and Microelectronics category)
- Dylan Smith (Ugrad 2022 and BUILD EXITO scholar)
- Wenyu Bi (Ugrad capstone design team 2021-22)
- Eyal Eynis (Ugrad capstone design team 2021-22)
- Travis Johnson (Ugrad capstone design team 2021-22)
- Wei Yan (Ugrad capstone design team 2021-22)
- Jacob White (Undergraduate honors thesis 2021)
- Yousef Alkhelaifi (Ugrad capstone design team 2020-21)
- Yudi Bao (Ugrad capstone design team 2020-21)
- Brandon Garcia (Ugrad capstone design team 2020-21)
- Yikun Wang (Ugrad capstone design team 2020-21)
- Calvin Xaybanha (Ugrad capstone design team 2020-21)