Status Goals and Plans For Dec 10, 2009

New Main Goal: Spend winter break reading literature and find both an area and a niche to fill.

Previous Main Goal: Understand, simulate & evolve an IC-based antenna
This seems to be at least partly complete as far as available tools are available.  The novelty of it has worn off after reading more literature.



Accomplished

• Finals
• Evaluated Agilent ADS as a design tool for the patch antennas
• Scripting interface not available
• Wrote to CST Studio developers regarding the same topic
• Scripting interface not available.  Tool does not run under Linux except for their distributed computing component
• Interestingly though, tool does make use of CUDA to speed up E&M simulations
• Read some literature on being productive and being accomplished 
• Study Hacks
• Scott H Young
• Grad Hacker
  

Longer Term Goals

• Antenna simulator that can do FEM and FDTD simulations
• Complete DoE Fellowship Application
• Investigate DHS Fellowship & NASA GSRP
• Assist Kal in getting started
• Electrical Engineering Labs Book
  

Short Term Planned

• Accumulate a list of papers to read in the next few weeks
• Begin thinking of ideas that may integrate a 223 project as a way of teaching myself CUDA
• Read aforementioned papers
• Meet with subset of the nanopore group to discuss some potential collaborationCreate a list of labs and topics for EE/CE fundamentals courses for book

Read
[1] K. Topalli, Z.A. Civi, S. Demir, S. Koc, and T. Akin, "A Monolithic Phased Array Using 3-bit Distributed RF MEMS Phase Shifters," IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol. 56, 2008, pp. 270-277.
[2] Z. Ihsan and K. Solbach, "Investigation of Patch Array Antenna Pattern Degradation," ITG-Fachbericht-GeMIC 2008, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 462-466.