Research and Personnel

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.

For a sample of projects in the WEST Lab's purview, see below and this writeup of undergraduate project ideas.

Current lab members

WEST Lab members convene weekly to discuss recent research results, journal articles, practice talks for upcoming conferences, and more. Meetings are held at a time that is adjusted to fit schedules every quarter. Send me an email at the address above if you'd like to join a meeting.

Haziq Rohail

PhD Student, Summer 2023 - present

Project Description: Oscillators are signal generators that play a key role in RF communication systems. Oscillator instability, also known as phase noise, can result in reciprocal mixing which degrades the system SNR. Current communication systems use high-Q crystal oscillators, which are very accurate but consume at least a few milliwatts of power, if not more. The goal of crystal-free IoT is to replace the crystal oscillator with a low power on-chip free-running oscillator, to reduce the power and area requirements for the IoT mote. However, free-running oscillators tend to have poor frequency stability. Not only does that result in reciprocal mixing, but the frequency of the free-running oscillator drifts over time which can cause carrier mismatch between the transmitter and receiver during packet transmission. The goal of this project is to improve the frequency stability of CMOS oscillators to satisfy FSK based communication standards such as BLE and IEEE 802.15.4, and to explore the design tradeoffs in terms of circuit topologies, power consumption, and area.

Biography: Haziq Rohail received his BS degree in electrical engineering from National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Pakistan in 2020, where he focussed on RF circuit design. He worked as a research engineer at PI Invent, Pakistan, from 2020 to 2023, where his focus was on Analog/RF IC design in 130 nm and 65 nm CMOS. He is currently pursuing his PhD in electrical engineering from Portland State University under the supervision of Dr. David C. Burnett. His current research interest is in RF IC design, specifically low power oscillator design for IoT motes.

LinkedIn

Hayden Galante

PhD student co-advised with Dr. Atul Ingle, PSU CS

Project Description: Hayden’s research aims to implement histogram-less processors for single-photon avalanche diode(SPAD) cameras on FPGAs and ASICs. SPAD photodetectors are a technology that allows for high-spatial-resolution 3D imaging. However, taking advantage of SPAD's high spatial resolution requires building large histograms of time-of-flight data. The memory and bandwidth required to build and read these histograms make high-resolution SPAD imaging too power-intensive for embedded applications. By eliminating the need for histograms, we can substantially lower the camera’s power consumption.

Biography: Hayden is pursuing a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus on SPAD time-of-flight image processing architectures. Hayden completed post-baccalaureate work in ECE at Portland State and is expecting to receive his MS in ECE in Spring 2024. Additionally, he received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from UC San Diego.

Brandon Hippe

Graduate researcher, Fall 2023 - present

Brandon is working on designing a BLE-compatible prototyping system around Adalm-Pluto Software Defined Radios. This has included work on understanding the BLE 1M PHY, creating scripts to assemble and decode valid packets, and developing HDL code to implement clock and data recovery on the FPGA onboard an Adalm-Pluto.

Brandon was also a part of the WEST Lab's 2022-23 Ugrad capstone design team, and has continued to maintain the Indoor Air Quality Monitoring system developed as a part of their project. This included fixing issues and maintaining the nodes, as well as presenting the project at the 2023 IEEE Sensors Conference in Vienna, Austria and the 2024 PSU Student Research Symposium.

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.

Quinn Morgan

USGS-PSU Partnership Scholar and PSU-ENSTA Internship Awardee

Project Description: "Developing tools and workflows for acoustic unattended monitoring of river bedload." Bedload transport encompasses the coarse material, 20-100mm gravel, traveling downstream. This metric is incredibly important to hydrologists and scientists studying how riverbeds change over time. Additionally, salmon conservation efforts use this metric to predict the changes or destruction of spawning grounds. Tracking and validating bedload movement is a non-trivial task with existing methods being expensive, time consuming and even dangerous. However, the acoustic signature of bedload impacts (Sediment Generated Noise) is detectable by the use of hydrophones (underwater microphones). This project aims at developing an acoustic designing signal processing techniques as well as physical hardware to facilitate and improve upon the detection of bedload transport.

Research for this project was supported in part by the USGS-PSU Partnership Seed Grant 2022A. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Geological Survey under Grant/Cooperative Agreement No. G23AC00003.

Eric Zhou

Nate Sjullie

Mitch Montee

Past Students and Other WEST Lab Associates



"West" compass rose image from Wikipedia.