Pitt HomeEngineering HomeContact Us
School of Engineering

Undergraduate Research Opportunities

There are a number of opportunities for EE and CoE undergraduates to be involved in research projects with faculty and graduate students. Projects listed below should be considered ongoing unless an end date is specified.

Participation in these projects may be through Senior Design, Independent Study (ECE/COE 1898), or as part-time work, depending on the project. Be sure to note the required course background and QPA expected for participation in each project.

PROJECTS currently available

Allen Cheng

Implementing Versatile Instruction Processing (VIP) Core for Embedded Multimedia Microprocessors

The objective of this project is to implement and synthesize custom circuit design for the state-of-the-art processing unit using Verilog/VHDL. VIP has recently been proposed to replace the conventional ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) in embedded multimedia microprocessor to achieve higher performance (e.g. 400% improvement on mpeg2 application.) You will be given the high level design specification of the VIP core and implement it using standard cell synthesis and FPGA. Compare both implementations in terms of the circuit area, speed, and power consumption. If time permits, students will also be provided the chance to research and implement some low-power techniques to conserve the energy consumption for longer battery life.

alex Jones

Instrumenting Parallel Applications for Communication Pattern Visualization and Prediction
Parallel applications contain communication operations that require data to be sent from one processor to another a various points during program execution. These communication operations often follow patterns and may be predictable. In this work, we will instrument a set of parallel applications to generate traces so that their ommunications may be studied and then through simulation of various prediction schemes, their performance can be improved.

Implementing Perl regular expressions in a Content Addressable Memory (CAM) for intrusion detection
One technique for intrusion detection, SNORT, has been proposed to detect various types of attacks in a network. However, running SNORT is much to slow for high throughput networks such as Gigabit Ethernet. A technique has been proposed to implement many types of SNORT rules using a Content Addressable Memory (CAM). Several rules were not be implemented in this manner because they require Perl regular expressions. This senior design project will examine these rules and determine how they may be implemented using a CAM.

Steve Levitan

Computer Generated Shapes for Artwork
The goal of this work is to write a program which generates 2-D shapes from intersections of a small number of conic sections. The primary constraint is that the final area of intersection for each shape be a constant. Work will be in collaboration with a professor in the Art Department at Pitt.

Marlin Mickle

Projects related to radio-frequency identification (RFID)

Greg Reed

Projects involving low-level power conversion technologies, such as AC/DC converters for various applications, as well as other types of converters/rectifiers/choppers.

Projects involving power quality measurement techniques and analysis (on the low power side), involving simulations / system analysis.

Projects involving operations of small motors and drives (building a motor or drive system, and performing various mechanical and electrical testing, etc.).

Power flow and power transients programming


Other Opportunities

University of Pittsburgh Undergraduate Research opportunities are listed here.

Summer Research Opportunities

Each spring we receive information from universities around the country announcing summer research opportunities for undergraduates. Students will often receive e-mail notification of these opportunities and many are posted on the ECE bulletin boards. Here is a sample of recent and ongoing opportunities:

Ongoing Programs

2008 Programs

2007 Programs

 

 

 

Senior Design

A student design team works with the Children's Museum on an interactive radio exhibit.

You are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Although this site is viewable in all browsers, it will look much better in a browser that supports Web standards.