Senior Design

Website: http://dec1414.ece.iastate.edu/

 

Senior design is a simulation of real-world professional design for engineers. It is a two-semester required course designed to help students prepare for the workplace. The topic of our group is Low Cost RF Power Meter. Our client, PowerFilm, asked us to design and build a completed low cost RF power meter.

 

Our group contains six members, so in order to increase the difficulty of this project, we were divided into two sub-teams. One team was to design and build the directional coupler which attenuates the power level from client’s input source; another team, I as the leader, was to design and build the detection device. None of us have any knowledge in RF area, so this is a challenging project for our team.

 

My responsibility in our senior design group is to design the schematics, run the simulation, and design the PCB layout. The simulation software I used is Advanced Design System (ADS) which I have never used before. The fundamental circuit contains impedance matching, detector (Schottky diode), low-pass filter, scaling amplifier, and multiplier. I spent most of my time on the simulation, since I think a good simulation is the key to make a system work well. When all circuit design has been settled, I used Eagle PCB for our PCB design. However, the final PCB design still had slightly overheating problem, so I still need to improve my routing and component placement skill to get a better PCB layout.

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Personally, I think this is an amazing design experience to me. As the leader of one sub-group, I started to learn how to take responsibility and how to commit to my teammates. At the beginning of this project, I was nervous about my deficiency in RF understanding, but after this senior design, I become confident when I confront a new and unfamiliar topic of field. This senior design teaches me how to learn a new concept and how to effectively do the research in a further level.