Aalto University
Aalto University Students Design a 1.5 GHz Doppler Radar Using NI AWR Software
NI AWR software’s ease of use enables students to fully focus on their exercises without spending time learning numerous different design tools. After completing the course, students feel very capable of tackling virtually any real-world microwave engineering design or analysis challenge.
Ville Viikari
Associate Professor
Aalto University
Aalto University Students Design a 1.5 GHz Doppler Radar Using NI AWR Software
Company
Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, has six schools with nearly 20,000 students and 4,000 employees and is ranked fifth in the world among universities founded in the Twenty-First Century. The university has a long tradition of cooperation with the surrounding society and business world, which improves the student learning experience by bringing in real-world business examples and teaching required work skills through partner workshops. Important research areas at the School of Electrical Engineering include traditional electronics, electrotechnology, and telecommunications technology.
Challenge
Microwave Engineering II is a master-level course offered in Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering. The goal of the course is for students to learn to analyze and design passive and active microwave components such as couplers, filters, mixers, oscillators, and amplifiers, as well as systems consisting of many components.
To reach this goal, the students design various components during the course and integrate them into a complete system at the end. The theme in 2018 was to design a 1.5 GHz Doppler radar on a single printed-circuit board (PCB) using surface-mount passive and active components. The designed building blocks required to realize the radar were an oscillator, amplifiers, a mixer, couplers, and filters.
Solution
Professor Viikari chose NI AWR Design Environment simulation software to teach his students how to design the components and integrate them into the radar PCB. Two key advantages of NI AWR software are that the tools are free as part of the AWR University Program and the platform is easy to use and intuitive.
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