1. Student must be in good academic standing to register for Undergraduate Research (EE 48499).

2. Undergrad research has a per-semester minimum of 1 credit hour.
A maximum of 6 hours may be applied toward graduation,
satisfying EE Elective requirements.

3. For every credit – 3 hours of research must apply, i.e. 3 credits = 9 hours weekly research.

4. Undergraduate research may be carried out in return for academic credit (EE 48499) or for financial compensation as a part-time job. Students carrying out research as a part-time job should still sign up for 0 credits of EE 48499.

5. Student must submit a written report summarizing the research and give an oral presentation concerning the project to at least 2 faculty members, one of whom must be the EE 48499 advisor.

6. Undergraduate Research may substitute for Senior Design under the following conditions: The student must a) find a professor of Electrical Engineering willing to advise a project for two full semesters; b) register for at least two credits of UR in each of the two semesters; c) keep a formal research notebook and have it approved by the advisor and a second faculty member at the end of each semester. The project must be approved by the Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Committee to determine its rigor and suitability as research and design experienced. Finally, the student must satisfy all of the rules of UR as stipulated above. UR credit intended to substitute for Senior Design beyond the total of 4 credits cannot be applied to any other EE electives.

7. Grades are based on what was accomplished and the effort put forth by the student.

Advances in sensor, actuator and microprocessor technology (MEMS and nanotechnology) have enabled distributed implementation of sensor and control actions over sensor/actuator networks. Such networks may consist of a large number of embedded processors typically of limited processing power, which should perform well under severe resource constraints (e.g. limited battery life) and under unreliable and limited communication conditions (e.g. wireless ad-hoc networks) over wide geographic areas and for long periods of time. These units must coordinate their actions in order to accomplish desired goals, such as controlling the orientation of a group of micro communication satellites or the output of a power plant. In order to build successful networked control systems we need to address novel questions and issues that lie in the intersection of control, computing and communication networks and transcend the traditional problem formulations in those areas.

This research project will focus on building a wireless feedback loop for a ball and beam system and study the implications of networking on the stability and performance of the control system.

This project focuses on simple light based methods to detect and avoid obstacles using (modulated) light sources. A four wheel vehicle and a two track rover are available to test the developed circuits. Most of the required work consists of analog and digital circuit design and vehicle performance testing on a testbed. This is a follow up project to a previous project that was started in Spring 2004.

(2) Beacon based navigation aids for autonomous vehicles:

This project attempts to develop new beacon based guidance methods for autonomous vehicles for GPS denied areas. Global guidance to the general destination area is done by GPS (and is investigated in a separate project in AERO/MECH Engineering - Dr. Batill), but local guidance is done using navigation beacons. This principle has already been proved to work on a testbed and is now ready to be modified for outdoor environments. IR / radio beacons and matched receivers will need to be integrated into the system. Practically all work is hardware related, and a significant amount of time will need to be spent on outdoor testing.

(3) Formation forming in simple agent clusters:

New ultra low complexity circuits and sensors will be investigated for achieving formation forming of mobile agents. There are 3 to 4 four wheel vehicle available for this work and the goal is to demonstrate that certain simple vehicle formations can be achieved with very low complexity systems. This project requires the modification of already existing circuits to change and fine tune the behavior of a single node and as a consequence, the behavior of the entire cluster.

(3) Formation forming in simple agent clusters:

This project attempts to solve problems similar to the traveling salesman problem but with more than one agent. The idea is to serve m targets with n mobile agents (m>n) in a way that is in some form as close to optimal as possible. The focus of this approach is to use potential field methods. The project entails a mix of hardware and simulation work.

2. Another research project involves the fabrication and characterization of high-speed, low-power semiconductor devices for high-performance systems. The student will work with graduate researchers, contributing to the development of fabrication processes in the NDNF. Possibilities include reactive ion etching, photolithography, and metallization. The student will also be involved in the DC and high-frequency electrical characterization of the performance of completed devices in the High Speed Circuits & Devices Lab.

Projects related to ongoing photonics research and teaching activities are available. Current projects include: (1) III-V compound semiconductor oxidation experiments [coupled with thin film thickness measurements via prism coupling, variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometry (VASE), etching/surface profilometry, and/or scanning electron microscopy] to determine oxidation rates and thermal activation energies for different III-V alloys; (2) Variable Angle Spectroscopic Ellipsometry (VASE) measurement modeling and automation using commercial VASE Manager program to develop automatic measurement routines for standard thin films (silicon oxide, silicon nitride, polysilicon, photoresist) used in IC Fabrication Lab; (3) Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) optical waveguide device design, fabrication and characterization, particularly for realization of an arrayed-waveguide-grating (AWG) device, a type of photonic integrated circuit used in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based fiber optic communications; (4) Implementation of Gigabit Ethernet optical fiber link using pre-commercial optical transceiver modules donated by Molex.

2) Basic transport software for 1D Poisson solver I want to come out with a software package that will calculate the transport properties of semiconductors based on a set of inputs. A student with good programming skills would find it a good exercise in semiconductor physics. In short, the software would be an application that would take the semiconductor material (Silicon, GaAs, GaN, etc…), the doping and defect density and calculate the mobility and carrier concentrations as a function of temperature. The application would be very useful, on the lines of Prof. Snider’s 1D Poisson solver.

The Nano-Optics Laboratory specializes in very high spatial-resolution optical spectroscopy utilizing near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) techniques. To do this, we have developed expertise in making optical fiber probes with apertures as small as 50 nanometers. A student project for this research would focus on fiber tip production; that is, making a number of fiber probes for use with our room-temperature NSOM system. This project would involve learning to pull and etch the fibers, evaluating their quality by transmission loss measurements, and gluing them into the system with a tuning-fork distance monitor.

The course is run as individual projects (sometimes 2 people team up to work together). After 2-3 weeks of meeting as a group, students select independent projects to work on for the rest of the semester. Meetings with Dr. Stevenson are then held individually once a week for approximately 1/2 hour. Meeting topics generally center around what was accomplished during the past week and current problems or goals.
At the end of the semester the student must
• prepare a written report (10-20 pages)
• give a fifteen minute presentation about the project to two faculty member

Grades are based on what was accomplished and the effort put forth by the student.

Research Topics
Dr. Stevenson's graduate research centers around image and video processing. Any project which can contribute to this effort is acceptable. Some successful example projects which were done in the past include:

• Image Filtering
• Video Filtering
• Parallel Image Processing
• Image Stabilization

Dr. Stevenson has plenty of projects which build on these examples and some which take a completely different direction. If the examples interest you stop by to talk to him about specific projects on which you may be able to contribute to as an undergraduate researcher.

1) Design and setup a wafer bonding system. Wafer bonding is a process that joins semiconductor wafers without the addition of an adhesive agent. It is an important technique in applications including microelectronics, power electronics, microelectromechanical systems, optoelectronics and multifunction chips. Its prominent commercial usage is production of silicon-on-insulator wafers (http://www.soitec.com/). In my group, the current interests are to combine various compound semiconductors and Si through wafer bonding. One of the goal applications is AlGaAs/GaAs/GaN HBTs. As the initial stage of the project, it is an experimental experience applying principles of material science, mechanical and electrical engineering.

2) Develop an ohmic contact process for AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMT) and study contact resistance distributions. HEMT is one of the most important device structures in microwave applications. AlGaN/GaN HEMT is the leading star in high-power high temperature electronics, as demonstrated in the past few years. It also serves as one of the platforms for emerging bio and chemical sensing technologies. The ability of making high quality ohmic contacts is one of the key steps. This project will involve heavily semiconductor processing experiments and electrical testing using nanofabrication facilities.

In both of the projects above, undergraduate students are encouraged to work with graduate students.