Students have been e-mailing me and asking me about my 4 th year projects. Unfortunately at this stage it is a little hard to give a really good idea of what I do. You would have to do the project to really know! The best indicator as to whether you would enjoy doing RFIC design in your 4th year project is how well you liked 97.359. If it was your favorite course you are probably in the right spot and if not... In 2002-2003 I had my students work on parts of a cable tuner using CMOS technology. Cable tuners are used in things like cable modems and TV sets. In 2003-2004 we worked on a more traditional radio for WLAN. In 2004-2005 my focus shifted to frequency synthesizers for wirelss applications. Next year it may or may not be something different, but whether it is wireless local area networks, cell phones, GPS, or even cable modems they are all fundamentally radios and the concepts are all the same.
These were my 4th Year Projects for 2004-2005 school
year:
Paul Dagenais: A 2.4-2.5 GHz Fractional-N SD
Frequency Synthesizer Using PFD/CP
Alex Beckstead: 3rd Order Mash SD Controller
Kingsley Yu: Sigma-Delta Modulation in Fractional-N Frequency Synthesis
Mike Ratajczak: Pulse Swallow Divider for a Wireless Tranceiver
Daryl Gee: A Radio Frequency LC Voltage Controlled Oscillator
These were my 4th Year Projects for 2003-2004 school year:
Hao Shang: A 2.5GHz Class A PA Design
Susan Yuen: Tuned Differential Low Noise Amplifier at
2.4GHz
Ken Ng: A 5.2GHz Class AB Power Amplifier
Tarun Patel: 1GHz-2GHz Broadband Low Noise Amplifier
Noah Moser: A 5.2GHz Differential Cascode Low
Noise
Amplifier (report)
Andre R. Birch: Common Base Colpitts Oscillator at
5.2GHz
Here are a couple of examples of projects that students have done with me in the 2002-2003 school year:
Vincent Karam: A Current Folded Down
Conversion
Mixer in 0.18um CMOS (
report )
Mark Fairbairn: CMOS Cable Tuner: Frequency
Synthesizer
( report )
Kevin Cheung: Voltage-Controlled Oscillators in
Cable Tuners (
report )
Bi Pham: A 1.9GHz Gilbert Mixer on 0.18um CMOS
for a Cable Tuner (
report )
Christina George: Design of a Broadband Low-Noise
Amplifier for use in a Cable Tuner (
report )
Derek van Gaal: Low Noise Amplifier for a Cable
Tuner