Davis Advanced RF Technologies Lab

Joining DART Lab as a PhD Student

One of the philosophies of our group is to provide the students with a comprehensive training/learning experience in a diversity of technical directions. We are lucky to have a group of talented researchers, students, and collaborators with diverse expertise in micro-devices, passive/active circuits, and system design.

We are always looking for motivated students and researchers to join our group at UC Davis. Typical characteristics that we are looking for include strong motivation, good work ethics, strong analytical and hands-on skills, and above all, a curiosity about how things work and why they work.

Although the type and number of openings vary from year to year with the level of research funding, interested candidates should always free feel to contact Dr. Liu (lxgliu@ucdavis.edu) or other group members to learn about the activities and the atmosphere in the group. Due to the large of emails that Dr. Liu receive everyday, he may not respond immediately but he does read every email. Typically Dr. Liu will arrange for phone interviews with students that he sees as a potential fit for the group in mid February.

For Undergraduate Students Seeking Research Experience

Our general recommendation for undergraduate students is to focus on getting good grades in your coursework. However, if you feel that you have extra time and energy, and/or that you want to explore research experience over the summer, you are most welcome to contact Dr. Liu for more information.

For undergraduate students from outside of the US wanting to do summer research with our group, we are happy to host you in our group if you are able to present evidence of strong academic achievement. In general, we will not be able to provide financial support for your stay here.

For students with US citizenship, we currently have a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program that can provide some level of financial support. The project is aimed at developing novel device, circuit, and signal processing techniques to realize reconfigurable bandpass-sampling receivers for software defined radio (SDR) applications.

For UC Davis Master Students Seeking a Project

We welcome master students who want to either experience graduate research or gain practical electronics skills for better preparation of a future job. Since most of the projects in our group relate to building actual hardware, which generally requires a longer time for the student to acquire the necessary skills and produce results, we take only Plan 1 students who can start working on their research project from either the Fall or the Winter quarter of the first year. Students who are interested in Plan 2 should enroll in the EEC290P capstone project course.

In particular, we are looking for students interested in one or more of the following topics:

• Analog and RFIC design

• Board-level RF front-end system design

• High-speed data acquisition system design

• Small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design

• Radar signal processing

We treat Plan 1 master student similarly as PhD students, expecting critical thinking and strong work ethics. Accordingly, we provide similar support to Plan 1 students in terms of office space, computation resources, tape-out/prototyping opportunities, etc, with the exception of financial support. If you are a Master student looking for a project in our group, please make sure that you start the discussion with Dr. Liu in your first year here!

For Non-UCD PhD Students Seeking an Research Exchange Program

Please contact Prof. Liu directly with your CV and a short email explaining your research background and interest.