SURP
The Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) is an umbrella organization that administers and scaffolds summer undergraduate research opportunities within UCLA Samueli. We currently coordinate several programs, including the Future of Semiconductors, Functional Nanomaterials, Engineering Faculty Lab REU Supplement, and the Electrical & Computer Engineering Fast Track to Success Summer Scholars Program. The program is now fully in-person.
The UCLA Integrated Sensors Laboratory (ISL) started collaborating with SURP in the Summer of 2024. Through 10 rigorous weeks of intense learning and research, undergraduate students experience firsthand the hands-on, cutting-edge research ongoing in ISL. They learn the basics of circuit theory and transmission lines, as well as signal propagation. The summer internship at ISL equips them with the background knowledge and the required safety training to handle sensitive equipment such as mm-Wave sources, arbitrary waveform generators (AWG), spectrum analyzers (SA), and VDI spectrum analyzer extenders (SAX), and perform wireline and over-the-air (OTA) measurements for their data collection. This experience prepares the interns for a successful completion of their undergraduate degree and gives them a flavor of the state-of-the-art research in the field.
SURP 2025
SURP 2024
Louis Law
Undergraduate Intern
Achieving higher data transmission speeds in wireless communication necessitates the use of elevated carrier frequencies, such as those in the sub-THz/mm-wave range. However, power attenuation at these frequencies, primarily due to free-space path loss. presents significant challenges to maintaining energy-efficient transmission, making power optimization critical.
One major hurdle at this frequency scale is the inherent variability in the output frequency and power of transmission chips. This variability, driven by high environmental sensitivity, causes subtle day-to-day fluctuations in chip behavior. Testing and optimizing chip transmission traditionally requires a labor-intensive manual calibration process, where researchers sweep through various bias voltage ranges and analyze the resulting output to identify critical voltage values.
Our research seeks to automate this calibration process by developing a MATLAB application that controls a custom-designed board capable of autonomously sweeping voltages and interfacing with relevant instruments for real-time data acquisition. This automation significantly improves calibration efficiency and accuracy, paving the way for more reliable and comfortable chip performance benchmarking.
