Evan Cullens, Ph.D.

he/him

Education: Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering (May 2006)

Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering from University of Colorado-Boulder

McNair Project: Development of a Sequence Generator for the Testing of Future Mars Rover Transceivers (2005)

Mentor: William Kuhn, Ph.D.

Testing of an RFIC to be used in micro-transceivers on future Mars exploration vehicles is discussed. This test focuses on the receiver circuitry and involves creating a test signal for the BPSK (binary phase shift keying) modulated signal. The test sequence captures approximately 200 msec of idle sequence followed by an attached synchronization marker (ASM). Four different data sets are available via an arbitrary waveform generator for the four different bit rates that the RFIC will need to support: 1000, 2000, 4000, and 8000 bits per second. A pseudo-random bit sequence was included. An overview of the transceiver operations as well as a discussion of the development of the data sets is presented.