ECE Nugget 1.)
ECE 4760 deals with microcontrollers as components in electronic design and embedded control. The purpose of this course is to enable its students to carry out sophisticated designs of the modern digital systems which now appear in products such as automobiles, appliances and industrial tools. The basis of such systems is the microcontroller, a microcomputer optimized for single-chip system design by possessing many peripheral devices geared to real-time applications [read more] .
The course is one of several Culminating Design Experience (CDE) courses. As such, it has a large design component. There are four or five lab exercises followed by a 5-week design project. All lab exercises have an ‘open-ended’ component. For instance, one exercise last year was a video game which could be implemented in many ways and with many different features. The final design projects are specified, designed and build by small groups of students. Each group can build whatever they feel they can fit within their abilities, interests, budget, and available microcontroller resources.
Thomas Craig and Bradley Factor built a Trumpet MIDI Controller which combines custom hardware and software with the Yamaha Silent Brass pickup mute to convert any standard trumpet into a fully functional MIDI controller and MIDI pass through device for up to 16 channels [read more].
-- Senior Lecturer Bruce Land
ECE Nugget 2.)
ECE 5760 (http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ece576/) deals with system-on-chip and embedded control in electronic design. The purpose of this course is to enable its students to carry out sophisticated designs of digital systems using system-on-programmable-chip (SOPC) techniques, along with a variety of digital and analog interface technologies to build complex devices.
The course currently uses Altera/Terasic DE2 boards which have a FPGA with about 33,000 logic elements, 100 4kbit RAM blocks, and 70 hardware multipliers. In addition, the DE2 board supports audio, video, Ethernet, serial and SD card input/output. It is possible to instantiate about 10 32-bit processors, or several hundred second-order digital audio filters. Students perform four or five exercises, then specify, design and build a final project lasting about five weeks.
Past projects include a parallel ray tracer (see photo), real-time sound spatialization, and an all-digital lock-in amplifier. The relatively low speed clock of the FPGA (50-200 MHz), coupled with the flexible hardware specification possible in Verilog, encourages highly parallel computational design.
-- Senior Lecturer Bruce Land
ECE Nugget 3.)
2009 CU Solar Decathlon House
The Solar Decathlon is an international, interdisciplinary design-build competition hosted biennially by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty college and university teams compete to design, build and operate the most attractive, effective and energy-efficient solar-powered house. The final judging competition this year took place October 9-13 & 15-18, 2009, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This year Cornell placed seventh in the competition. [read more].
-- Senior Lecturer Bruce Land
ECE Nugget 4.)
Radioistope powered near-perpetual RFID can operate over several decades, using miniscule amount of radioisotope for enabling reliable wireless sensor networks [read more].
-- Associate Professor Amit Lal
ECE Nugget 5.)
RIPEL (RadioIsotope Powered Electron Lithography) – allows less than 30nm features over large areas without needing vacuum or electron focusing equipment – enabling large area nanomanufacturing. [read more].
-- Associate Professor Amit Lal
ECE Nugget 6.)
ECE Nugget 7.)
Silicon based high-intensity ultrasonic actuators with integrated sensing enables new ways of detecting disease through tissue imaging [read more].
-- Associate Professor Amit Lal
ECE Nugget 8.)
Approximating the capacity of wireless networks
Extending Shannon's theory for point-to-point communication systems to the network setting has been one of the greatest challenges in information theory over the past few decades. In this project we develop simple, deterministic channel models that capture the main features of the wireless medium, and utilized them to approximate the capacity of more complex networks. Using this approach, we have already made progress on several long-standing open problems in the field [read more].
-- Assistant Professor Salman Avestimehr
ECE Nugget 9.)
Distributed protocol design for wireless networks
One of the main practical considerations for decentralized wireless networks is that the nodes have to operate in a distributed fashion with local information about the network. Despite the importance of these fundamental constraints, they have often been ignored in network information theory. Our goal is to develop a framework to study the impact of these practical limitations on network capacity and design distributed algorithms that get close to the optimal performance[read more].
-- Assistant Professor Salman Avestimehr
ECE Nugget 10.)
On-chip Time-Stretching System associates the chirped carrier with the dispersive filter to achieve the temporal manipulating of the signal. It can also perform ultra-wideband signal processing. [read more].
-- Associate Professor Alyssa Apsel
ECE Nugget 11.)
ECE Nugget 12.)
ECE Nugget 13.)
State-of-the-art GaN switching transistors for power conversion
GaN-based materials have attracted a lot of interests in recent years for high voltage and high power switching applications, because of the superior properties such as large breakdown field strength, high electron saturation velocity, large carrier densities at the heterojunctions, etc. Junxia Shi and Professor Lester F. Eastman have recently designed, fabricated, and characterized MISHFETs (metal-insulator-semiconductor heterojunction field-effect transistors) for this purpose. By the new technology, critical parameters for high power switching devices, such as low specific on-resistance, high breakdown voltage, extra low gate and drain leakage currents, and minimized current dispersion, are efficiently combined simultaneously, for the first time. This technology will find a wide market in highly efficient power conversion modules in both industrial and military applications, allowing tremendous energy conservation.
-- John L. Given Foundation Chair Professor of Engineering Lester Eastman