Stiff competition from other EFREI teams did not intimidate Xavier Gilles, Sylvain Marques and Pierre-Henry Dezaux from trying for Texas Instruments' US$100,000 DSP Challenge grand prize. The three third-year, undergraduate, engineering students attend the Ecole Francaise d'Electronique et d'Informatique (EFREI) outside Paris, and they make up one of the three finalist teams competing for the prize.
Pierre-Henry Dezaux, Xavier Gilles, and Sylvain Marques designed the front-end processor for a new Doppler radar. Doppler radars exploit the Doppler effect first described by the Austrian physicist, Christian Johann Doppler (1803 - 1853). The Doppler effect describes how objects modify the frequency of waveforms as they move through the air. Doppler techniques are widely used in modern radar. Doppler weather radar, for example, can detect tornadoes, wind shear, and other dangerous weather conditions.
The new radar that will use the winning team's interface is an automatic X-band instrumentation radar, called AXIR. AXIR represents a new breed of tracking radar: small, light, programmable, and very low-cost. It will provide an automatic ground-level capability to track objects, such as airplanes or moving targets, following every curve of their path to the ground from distances of 10 miles and more. It will also survey the area around the plane, detecting other aircraft, wind shear, strong turbulence, and other hazards. When linked to a TV camera with an adequate zoom lens, the AXIR radar can provide controllers with an optical image of the plane they are tracking. Since this radar requires no on-board equipment, it will function even in the event of power failures on the aircraft, offering a significant complement to today's instrument landing system, which depends on on-board electronics. And since it is based on conventional digital signal processors (DSPs), the AXIR radar system will cost less than today's radar systems, making it affordable for small civilian airports and air clubs. This radar will also be valuable for controlling the trajectory of sporting planes and parachute jumps, and tracking moving objects, such as race cars, in motion picture environments.
The EFREI team's processor is one part of an AXIR digital monopulse
Doppler radar, which is currently in the design and simulation
stage of development. Equipped with four 16-bit TI TMS320C50 DSPs,
the winning team's processor provides computing power of more
than 100 million instructions per second for sampling and coding
the antenna multiple channels, the pulse compression correlators
and the adaptive Doppler filtering. The operator desk for this
processor and three other processors associated with the new radar
is simply a PC running Windows for both control and display.
When Louis Fourdan, a part-time professor in radar and DSP courses at EFREI and two other engineering schools, heard about the TI DSP Challenge, he saw the contest as an opportunity to give students hands-on experience with DSP and radar design. He convinced EFREI's administration to give the students credit towards their degree requirements for their work on the Challenge and initially met with 60 of his students who were interested in working on his new radar system. He broke the digital processing part of the new radar into four sub-systems, and the student teams began work. In the end, two teams submitted their projects to the DSP Solutions Challenge, and the team of Pierre-Henry Dezaux (22), Xavier Gilles (22), and Sylvain Marques (22) won a place as one of three finalists worldwide.
Usually, when the team met without Professor Fourdan, it met at the home of Pierre-Henry Dezaux, an engineering student from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. "Being an engineer," said Pierre, "is the fulfillment of a dream I had as a child. I wanted to work with advanced technologies in a very practical way. All my educational experience-a scientific secondary education, with concentration in mathematics, physics and biology-affirms that this was the right decision."
In addition to his studies, Pierre is the secretary of his amateur radio association and is a catamaran sailing instructor. "Amateur radio contributed to my becoming an engineer because it gave me experience developing projects with a team. It has also taught me the importance of making contacts and learning different points of view; both of these qualities are important to an engineer."
Xavier Gilles became interested in engineering when he was 11 years old. "I wanted to create products that would improve how we live." Like Pierre, he is involved in amateur radio. Xavier also enjoys tennis and skiing. After working on the DSP Solutions Challenge, Xavier says, "Digital signal processing is providing the intelligence, flexibility and reliability for more and more products that we will use in our daily lives."
Sylvain Marques is the only member of the EFREI team who comes from an engineering family. He says, "I don't think that influenced my career decision. I became interested in an engineering career when I took advanced mathematics in secondary school. I am particularly fascinated by all the emerging radiocommunication technologies, including cellular mobile telephones, pagers, radar, satellite systems, and now, I am interested digital signal processing." For Sylvain, hobbies like tennis and scuba diving provide "a way to stand back from the pressures of school work."
All three EFREI students are involved in other team undertakings, ranging from class projects such as telemetry and industrial computer science, to team internships for developing software, to an organization of teams that provides electronics training to commercial firms.
Louis M. Fourdan is Adviser to the EFREI team. Fourdan, who received his degree from Ecole Superierure d'Electricite, has more than 35 years experience in Doppler radar research and design. Since 1961, he has served as a radar designer for Thomson CSF. At the same time, he has conducted courses and seminars at several engineering schools in France and Turkey, teaching subjects that include digital signal processing, the design and architecture of modern radars, phased-array antennas, and more. Committed to giving students hands-on experience, he has developed several software programs that provide students with practical exercises. In addition, Fourdan has published papers on Doppler quality and polyphase codes, and he holds eight patents.
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