Faculty/School

Faculty of Engineering

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Topic status

We're looking for students to study this topic.

Research centre

Primary Supervisor

Associate Professor Dhammika Jayalath
Position
Associate Professor
Division / Faculty
Faculty of Engineering

External supervisors

  • Dr Robby McKilliam, Whipbird Signals
  • Dr Robby McKilliam, Whipbird Signals

Overview

Research engagement

Signal processing applications in RADAR, electronic surveillance, and communications systems are regularly developed and deployed on *field programmable gate arrays* (FPGA).

FPGAs are common because of their strong computational performance and flexibility.

This performance and flexibility comes at a cost.

The cost of commonly used FPGA such as Xilinx's Zynq and Ultrascale SoCs range between several hundreds to several tens of thousands of dollars.

Complete systems deployed with these chips range from several thousands to several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Such cost is often acceptable for high-end RADAR, electronic surveillance, and communications platforms.

However, this cost is not acceptable for other types of systems and in particular expendable systems that are intended to be deployed at large scale.

Motivated by this, this project will investigate the feasibility of RADAR, electronic surveillance, and custom communication systems using commodity *digital signal processors* (DSP) designed for telecommunications market.

The price of such chips range from a few dollars to a few 10s of dollars.

An example is the NXP Layerscape LA9310 DSP used in the RFNM and LimeSDR Micro software defined radios.

Research activities

The project will suit students interested in one or more of:

  • radio frequency (RF) hardware design,
  • antenna design
  • embedded hardware design
  • digital signal processing
  • embedded software in c and assembly
  • embedded Linux development
  • continuous integration and test-driven development systems
  • git version control.

Research skills

Working with Software Defined Radio Systems

Outcomes

This project will build upon an existing in house designed software defined radio that uses the LA9310 DSP.

Skills and experience

Signal Processing, Telecommunications and embedded systems

Start date

2 November, 2026

End date

19 February, 2027

Location

Whipbird Signals Pty Ltd , 1/29 Main St, Samford Village QLD 4520

Keywords

Contact

0731388034

dhammika.jayalath@qut.edu.au