For a while I was doing a good job keeping up to date with documenting all of the interesting projects that I have been doing, posting about once a month to my website. Then almost an entire year passed without any real updates. So, this is what I have been up to during that year of silence.

I will start off with the projects that I have done as part of my course work at RIT. Last winter I started my Senior Design project, finishing it in the spring. For this course, we are allowed to pick our own teams and project. I teamed up with Cory Merkel and we worked on an Autonomous Weapon Turret, building the mechanical parts, hardware, and software ourselves. All of our work is very well documented on our RIT CE website.  If you have some time, in addition to looking at my project, I would recommend looking at the other RIT CE Senior Design Projects, most notably Jeff Kemp, Matt Prokop, and Mike Sanfilippo’s Home Sense Project (a home sensor network/automation project using Xbee modules). Below are a couple of pictures from our project. The first picture shows an early version of the software and the second shows the finished weapon turret.

I also took a Low Power Design course, focusing on the design of low power CMOS systems using circuit level, logic level, and system level power optimization techniques. This course proved to be a very good summary of the techniques both currently used in industry and being activelly researched in academia. We used simulation tools from Synopsys and Mentor Graphics in order to implement these techniques learned in class in a few smaller projects. My group’s final project was to take an AES hardware implementation and implement the low power techniques using Synopsys Design Compiler, Power Compiler, and PrimeTime. Our optimized design (utilizing clock gating and parallelization) resulted in a 29% reduction in power consumption over the baseline architecture with an 88% increase in area. Different configurations were also used to allow for more options for power/area trade-offs. This environment and our design recommendations were used in Ken Smith’s Master’s thesis that looked at AES power-profile-based side channel attacks. Specifically, he used our work to obtain instantaneous power traces that he then used as input vectors to his algorithm in order to determine the AES encryption key value.

My Systems Programming course focused on using x86 assembly and C in order to design and implement an operating system. The projects for this class included a simple assembler written in x86, Solaris system calls, device drivers, interrupts, process/thread management, pipes and fifos, terminal I/O, System V IPC, socket programming, and filesystems.

One of the more exciting classes that I just finished a few weeks ago was Microelectronics. In this class, in addition to the lecture section, I got to suit up in a “bunny suit” and get some hands-on expereince in fabricating semiconductor devices. We used the RIT Metal Gate PMOS process with a 10 micron feature size to fabricate PMOS transistors, op-amps, and logic gates (NAND, NOR) on 6-inch, <100> n-type Si wafers. In addition to the physical manufacturing, the process was simulated using ATHENA and the electrical simulations were preformed using ATLAS in order to compare our results between the theoretical, simulated, and experimental. A cross section of a PMOS transistor manufactured through this process is shown in the picture below.

The process included many of the same techniques used in modern CMOS processes. These include oxide growth, etch, photolithography, ion implantation, metal deposition, sintering, and electrical tests to validate the device functionality. The four photolithography steps were source and drain, gate, contact cut, and metal. Unfortunately I did not think to take pictures, but I do have a picture of the testing apparatus and results from the notes, shown below. The figure on the left shows the microscopic view of the wafer, specifically a PMOS transistor. The 12 probes (along the outside of the image) are aligned to the metal (aluminum) pads along the outside of the device for testing purposes. A HP-4145 analyzer was then used in order to do a voltage sweep to obtain a ID-VG curve and a ID-VD curve.

As far as independent projects go, I have been working on a few of those as well. First of all, I bought a couple of touchscreen monitors from a local electronics recycling company. I plan on using the monitors to build a touchscreen jukebox for my parents. Unfortunately, I am having trouble finiding the right power supply that is able to power the display, which makes me think the display itself is broken. I have a few different adapters that meet the specifications on the monitor and service manuals. The speakers and touch interface both work fine when I turn the monitor on, but the display itself will not turn on. I plan to meet with the company that sold them to me this week to confirm this, primarily to see if they will replace them before I take the monitors apart to diagnosis/fix the problem myself.

For CSH, I finished a design for a networked iButton door lock system. The purpose is to allow members of CSH to unlock common room doors electronically using an iButton and a solenoid locking mechanism. This essentially consists of an ATmega168 microcontroller (arduino), a WIZ811MJ wizenet ethernet module with SPI, an iButton reader, and a power MOSFET to control the solenoid locking mechanism. A working prototype version of this is shown in the picture below. I have a PCB design finished that I plan on manufacturing later this month so that I can actually install the system on the floor. I will post a more detailed update once that project is completely installed and finished. Below is a picture of the prototype. I probably should have done a better job setting that picture up, but a picture is better than no picture.

Another somewhat related project is something Dan Lampie and I have been working on – a power meter for Dan’s wind turbine. The core of this system is essentially the same as the iButton doorlocks. It uses the same microcontroller and ethernet module. Additionally, it has a hall-effect current sensor with a couple of op-amps for signal conditioning. Another, though quite different hall-effect sensor is used to monitor the blade speed (basically the same as the bike speed sensors). The microcontroller collects this information and sends it approximately once per second to a server through a wifi router installed at the wind turbine site. The server logs all of this information in a MySQL database and displays it in pretty graphs. This project is also still in the prototype stages. A couple of weeks ago we installed it on Dan’s turbine, but we had to make a few tweaks last weekend to get it working. I think within a month or so we should have it pretty stable, considering the upcoming holiday break and the fact that it has been difficult for Dan and I to find time to work on the project. Below is a picture of our prototype. I appologize for the picture quality, I only had my cell phone on me at the time.

Finally, to end this rather long post, I have a couple projects of a much, much less technical nature. First, shown in the picture below, my room mate and I held a wine tasting as part of our Wines of the World class. We chose Australian wines as our theme since their wines are typically inexpensive and of relatively good quality (we are both still college students). Second, over Thanksgiving break I beat my favorite Super Nintendo game, NBA Jam Tournament Edition. I remember playing this game on my SNES when I was younger, but I was never able to beat the entire game. This is likely because I never had the patience to play more than a couple games at a time. Overall I think I spent just a few hours over the course of a week playing the game to beat it. An interesting trivia fact – the NBA Jam series was coded entirely in assembly.