The project list for WaferCatalyst Project Program for 2013-14 is as follows.
Project Titles
1. Sensor interface chip
Sensors of many types are getting common in our daily lives. Today’s consumer electronics like air conditioner, smart phones, video game controllers and laptops have a number of sensors. Moreover sensors like temperature, pressure and humidity sensors have important applications in industrial control environments.
The students are required to design an interface IC that interfaces a common sensor (pressure, temperature etc.) to a microcontroller for further signal processing. The students will need to explore measurement and low speed digital conversion of signal for a commercially available sensor of their choice (based on its specifications).
Recommended group: 2-4 students
2. USB 2.0 Frontend (Transmitter and Receiver)
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is one of the most widely used standards in the consumer electronic world today. USB standard has been evolving for higher speeds in recent times with 1.1 giving way to 2.0 and now the latest 3.0. The USB 2.0 has highest transfer rate of 480Mbps which is enough for most applications and still commands a large percentage of the market space for USB.
In this project the students are required to design the transmitter and receiver for the USB 2.0 capable of physical transfer of data based on the USB 2.0 standard.
Recommended group: 2-4 students
3. Tunable Active low pass filter
Low pass filters are widely used to remove undesirable high frequency components from a lower frequency signal. In some applications tuning is a desirable characteristic to allow the filter to be able to filter signals that are orders of magnitude different in frequency range.
In this project the students are required to investigate the various methods of designing tunable low pass filters and implement a low pass filter that can be tunable up to 2 orders of magnitude in the frequency range.
Recommended group: 1-2 students
Low Drop Out regulator Design
A low-dropout or LDO regulator is a DC linear voltage regulator that is used in many analog applications where a low voltage drop is allowed between the available voltage and the desired voltage. Typical linear regulators may drop a large voltage between the input and the output (up to 2V) whereas LDO may drop a small voltage (as low as 100mV) between input and output. This has many applications since the available voltage is getting lower (e.g. 1.5V batteries) and thus only a stable voltage is needed without much difference from the input voltage.
In this project the students are required to design an LDO for cell phone applications. Students would need to investigate the battery voltage and typical specifications for LDO used in the design of cell phones.
Recommended group: 2-3 students
Design Support
Reports
Support
Fabrication Awards