Final Year projects (updated 7-Oct-07)
Supervisor: Dr C. Papavassiliou
Room: 915 Email: c.papavas@imperial.ac.uk
Student self-proposed design and construct
Propose a gadget you would like to design and make. Possible application areas
are: audio, remote control and remote sensing. You will design the gadget, make
a prototype and test it. The project does not have to be novel but should
address an engineering challenge in low noise circuits, radio frequency
electronics or instrumentation engineering. Projects may use
microcontrollers.
Laminar substrates for slow wave filters (4T only)
Laminar substrates, i.e. sandwiches of different materials, support the
propagation of slow electromagnetic modes. Miniaturised RF
printed filters can in principle be built on laminar substrates, offering the
possibility of developing high quality monolithic filters for CMOS chips. We will make slow mode filters on a novel
experimental platform developed in our research group. We will measure and
simulate these filters on full wave CAD simulators.
Low noise monolithic LC oscillators
We will use simulations to compare a number of tuning
mechanisms for CMOS voltage controlled oscillators. Our
objective is to understand how to keep phase noise low while maintaining a wide
tuning range. The project may also involve measurements on existing CMOS circuits (chips) developed in our research group.
Heterodyne phase noise measurement system (4T only)
Measuring oscillator phase noise presents a number of challenges. The most
obvious one is that the device tested must be phase locked to the Spectrum
analyser Local Oscillator. The second challenge is to frequency-translate a
small frequency range around the fundamental mode of the oscillator to a
convenient for observation Intermediate Frequency. This is a Design and make
project, and requires a solid understanding of Radio Frequency electronics, as
well as good laboratory technique.
CMOS polar amplifier in the 3-10GHz UWB band.
We will design a CMOS integrated power amplifier for
the MB-OFDM implementation of Ultra Wideband Radio
operating in the in the 3-10GHz frequency range. A polar amplifier is the
combination of a phase modulator and a D/A converter. Interfacing the two
circuits without losing efficiency is the problem we wish to study. This
project involves integrated circuit design and simulation on the Cadence CAD
platform.
Weakly coupled
oscillator arrays
Groups of coupled oscillators develop collective modes, spectrally purer than
the original oscillator. The simplest example is the ring oscillator widely
used in integrated electronics, despite its rather poor phase noise
characteristics.
In this project we will investigate, through SPICE simulations, the noise
properties of arrays of oscillators.
High resolution artificial vision
One way of increasing bandwidth in a sampled measurement
(at the expense of dynamic range) is to introduce jitter in the sampling
process. We look to develop an electronic way of introducing jitter into a
light detection experiment, by modulating the bias of the sensors. We will then
computationally attempt to extract higher resolution from the jittered raw
measurements.
Lossy filter synthesis
We will review the literature on lossy
filter synthesis and investigate the capabilities and limitations of using lossy building blocks to synthesise filters. This project
is related to synthesising all-transistor filters, since transistors are by nature
lossy integrators. Good understanding of analysis of
circuits and 2nd year analogue is essential.
This page maintained by Christos Papavassiliou
Last updated: 7 October 2007