Cal Poly engineering students and faculty visited Keysight Technologies’ facility in Santa Clara on Sept. 15 to present their collaborative project enhancing Keysight’s cutting-edge interferometer system.
The project, led by three Cal Poly faculty members – Dr. Siyuan Xing and Dr. Charlene Birdsong from Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Joseph Callenes from Computer Engineering – aims to develop new tools facilitating the integration and application of interferometer systems for Keysight users without expertise in motion control and system identification.
To support the project, Keysight has donated a three-axis, picometer-precision laser interferometer measurement system worth approximately $55,000 in addition to $300,000 in direct funding.
Over the course of the project, the team has involved four graduate and four undergraduate students from the Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering departments, forming an interdisciplinary group to develop tools of system identification and control leveraging Keysight’s high-precision laser interferometers.
The Cal Poly team has successfully developed and implemented algorithms for real-time control and offline and online systems identification, tested through vibration control of a piezo-actuated beam structure. Additionally, the group has built a new flexible and scalable interface that would allow the system to be used in a variety of emerging applications.
The key insight for the flexible architecture is that a real-time and I/O optimized co-processor can efficiently implement software-defined communication protocols alongside low-level, in-network data processing.
Their results have led to multiple peer-reviewed publications disseminated through professional conferences and journals. Students who participated in this project have started their careers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and tech companies such as Keysight Technologies and Millennium Space Systems.
On Sept. 15, Xing and Callenes, Aria Pegah and Tan Run En from Electrical Engineering met with Bill Volk, Keysight Technologies’ vice president and general manager, and John Flowers, R&D manager at Keysight Technologies Semiconductor Infrastructure Solutions Group. Two former ME graduates, Jordan Kochavi and Grant Gallagher, joined the meeting virtually.
The Cal Poly team reported their project to the R&D team led by Flowers, then hosted a question-and-answer session to address concerns and discuss the next steps. After the presentation, Flowers gave the Cal Poly team a tour of their facility, introducing Keysight’s production and testing lines of their laser measurement system.
During the tour of the state-of-the-art facility, the Cal Poly team learned how optical and electrical components are manufactured with extremely high precision and reliability. The team also met with several recent Cal Poly graduates who are now working at Keysight.
