Research
Research Areas and Resources
The MS EE degree offers emphases in the areas of communications and applied electromagnetics and embedded systems and control systems. In addition to the more discipline-specific equipment listed below, the ECE department has well-equipped laboratories of networked PCs, general purpose test and measurement equipment such as high-speed oscilloscopes, arbitrary function generators, logic analyzers, and printed circuit board prototyping machines and software.
Research activities in the communications and applied electromagnetics area include:
compact and reconfigurable antennas, electromagnetic propulsion of space sailcraft, engineered electromagnetic materials using active and passive circuit particles, and ultra-wideband and ground-penetrating radar.
Resources in support of this program include a number of vector network analyzers, impedance analyzers, Agilent Advanced Design System, Microwave Studio, and IE3D. In addition, the Steven P. Miller Endowed Chair in electrical engineering was established in 2001 to support telecommunications in the ECE department.
Research activities in the embedded systems and signal processing area include:
neural network and fuzzy logic chips, computationally intelligent systems, FPGA- and CPLD-based embedded system design, fault tolerant computer systems, residue and pseudo-floating point number architectures, pattern recognition, system identification, wavelet signal processing and adaptive signal processing.
Resources in support of this program include logic analyzers, a variety of microcontroller and microprocessor development systems, FPGA and CPLD prototyping boards, VHDL and Verilog compilers, Analog Devices DSP development tools, Mentor Graphics Computer Aided Design Toolset, a variety of microchip fabrication equipment, and printed circuit board manufacturing equipment.
Research activities in the area of control systems include:
robotics, machine control, fuzzy logic control, nonlinear and adaptive control, modeling of power systems, power systems stability, generator dynamics, fault analysis, and wind power. In addition, a number of robotics projects are performed in association with the School of Mines Center of Excellence in Advanced Manufacturing and Production (CAMP).