Building SSP Expertise into the Next Generation of Engineers Through Competitive Projects by Prof. Gregory D. Durgin [email protected] www.propagation.gatech.edu SSP Workshop (at IEEE WiSEE) 9 November 2013
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Building SSP Expertise into the Next Generation
of Engineers Through Competitive Projects
by Prof. Gregory D. Durgin [email protected]
www.propagation.gatech.edu
SSP Workshop (at IEEE WiSEE)9 November 2013
Acknowledgements NSF CAREER Grant ECS-0546955 Space Solar Power Institute Georgia Power William C. Brown Memorial Fellowship
Background Courses Taught
Sat. Communications, Antenna Eng. & Lab Microwave Design Lab Senior Design
GT Research Microwave backscatter RF scavenging sensors Radio wave propagation Wireless power transfer
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Goals of this Talk… Provide a template for educators for
building SSP expertise into students Demonstrate how much can be
accomplished with student projects Solicit ideas for future projects and
directions for MPT/SSP projects
Educational Conundrum
Need to train more of our top people in SSP-related technologies
The students need to build careers outside of SSP in order to survive professionally
Antennas & PropagationMicrowave Circuit DesignRF EngineeringOrbital MechanicsSemiconductor Physics
Inductive Power ChargingRFID and SensorsRF Energy HarvestingSatellite CommunicationsSolar Power Systems
Space SolarPower Study
Key Engineering Expertise Cutting-Edge Field
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William Brown Graduate Fellowship
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Senior Design SSP Demonstrator
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Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) Undergraduate ProjectSee-Through Rectenna Use of Metal Ink-Jet Printer
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Fall 2011 SatCom Project Group Projects (8+ teams, 4-5 members each) Challenging, Original Problem Statements Competitive Aspect of Grading Peer and Team Evaluations Web-based Project Reports Microwave Power Symposium at end of term Presentation by Frank Little of Texas A&M Hardware demonstration by undergraduates Poster Session by graduate students
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Online Summary of Projects
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http://www.propagation.gatech.edu/ECE6390/project/Fall2011/Project11.htm
http://www.propagation.gatech.edu/ECE6390/project/Projects.htm
Student Knowledge Assessment Test content by period
1: Astrodynamics2: Antennas & Propagation3: Telecommunications
Significant increase in Test 1 & 2 performance (SSP expertise)
No drop-off in Test 3 performance (non-SSP expertise)
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Survey Results:Project Mechanics
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Survey Results:Technical Content Interest
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Survey Results:Perception of Space Solar Power
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Conclusions Demonstrated class assessment gains of +6.4% on
content related to SSP Strong appreciation/interest developed for
electromagnetics, RF engineering, systems engineering
Students now literate in SSP issues, some inspired to continue study
All content online: experience can be mimicked or duplicated
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Lessons Learned Need a more focused project statement for any
future SSP projects Peer evaluators do a better job collectively than I
do in judging the efforts and correctness of projects
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Example of Peer Evaluation
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Moore’s Law in a New Light Basic Trend: comp.
power doubles < 2 years …in Operations/Joule …for the last 70 years! …when accounting for
all chip gains Does not say anything
about speed
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*J.G. Koomey, IEEE Spectrum, March 2010
Presenter
Presentation Notes
But microcontrollers resemble CPUs in one key way: they both have a Moore’s-type law associated with them. All applications of semiconductor materials do. And in previous talks, I had always struggled to make this point to my audience until a Stanford researcher published this marvelous graph in the IEEE spectrum a few months ago. This researcher, Koomey, plotted the computing power of specific computers/CPUs over the span of 70 years – including the time before the transistor. And the real genius of this plot is that the left-hand axis is plotted in units of “operations/joule” – the amount of stuff that you can compute per unit energy, regardless of the speed that you are trying to perform those operations. As you can see, the logarithmic y-axis spans 12-orders of magnitude on this graph. It includes the original computer, “ENIAC” on the lower left-hand side. Remember that in this era, computation was done with vacuum tubes. Moore’s law applies to vacuum tubes retroactively! The points on this graph include the effects of all technical innovations and is truly a business-innovation type relationship. Going from vacuum tubes to transistors to ICs; including architectural gains like pipelines and multi-core processing as well as those due to large-scale lithography. All semiconductor ICs have some comparable trend. We can expect these gains to hold up for CPUs for at least another decade. We can expect similar gains in other IC-areas such as microcontrollers.
Gains for Passive Communications
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P. Nikitin, KVS Rao, S. Lam, “UHF RFID Tag Characterization: Overview And State-of-the-Art”. AMTA Conference, Seattle, Oct 2012.
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