Research Facilities

Anechoic Chamber
Optical and RF Laboratories
Video and Image Processing Facility
Clean Room
Electrical Machine Test Facilities
Further Information

Anechoic Chamber

An 8 x 5 x 4m pyramidal-cone anechoic chamber designed and certified by Emerson & Cuming, served by a 65GHz Vector Network Analyser, a two-axis positioner and a polarised source that allows the full 3D radiation pattern characteristics of antenna elements and arrays to be measured and analysed over a frequency range of a few hundred MHz to tens of GHz.

Optical and RF Laboratories

The Optical Laboratory possesses a wide range of optical measurement and characterisation equipment including optical spectrum analysers, tuneable lasers, RIN measurement equipment, 0-12.5G and 25-43G BER test sets, high resolution spectrometers, 50 GHz oscilloscopes, and 50GHz vectorial network analyser.

Medav Channel Sounder

The RF and Wireless instrumentation includes several high performance vector signal generators, network analyser and spectrum analyser, thus facilitating the development hardware for wideband CDMA and OFDM based systems. In addition, an ultra high bandwidth, real-time oscilloscope and logic analyser, with in-circuit pattern generation capability provides digital design support for research and development of high performance wireless modems.

There is also a Medav multi-element wideband channel sounder with full remote MIMO operation including AGC and synchronisation, and which supports double-directional channel sounding measurements. The Medav channel sounder is complemented by an ultra-wideband modem and channel measurement tool from Time Domain, offering pulse-based 3 to 10Hz characterisation.

Video and Image Processing Facility

A comprehensive video and image processing facility exists at Bristol. The main studio hosts a high performance edit suite (Apple G5/Cinewave/Final Cut Pro), professional HD VTR and camera (Sony HDCam), a wide range of Sony, Panasonic and JVC standard definition equipment offering compatibility with most digital and analogue formats, a Pluto hard disk CCIR601 image sequence back-up facilities, studio quality HD and SD monitors, source switchers, frame grabbers and printers. The facility also contains a multi-HD camera capture facility with Dalsa cameras and Datacube hardware capable of capturing up to 24 HD streams in parallel. It also host various items of specialised equipment including surveillance (Panasonic) and infrared (Raytheon) cameras. A second studio comprises a range of equipment to support research into interactivity and immersion. This includes an Eye-Link eye tracker, a 2m immersive display and a Reachin haptic/3d display.

The Department's Clean Room

Clean Room

The clean room has full photonic fabrication capability, including a variety of photolithography, etching, (wet, RIE and ICP), PECVD, metal sputtering and dielectric optical coating equipment in a class 10,000 environment with class 100 workstations. Lasers and other optoelectronic components are manufactured with feature sizes down to 1 m. Additionally high performance RF circuits are fabricated with bandwidths up to 17GHz. The Department also has access to 2 focused ion beam etch systems (20 and 7nm resolution).

Electrical Machine
Testing Facilities

Electrical Machine Test Facilities

The Department has facilities for testing high-speed, high-power motors and generators. There are two machine rooms with a common control room equipped with a wide range of instrumentation for monitoring the performance of the machines. Machines can be tested up to 20,000 rpm and 100kW with higher power facilities under construction.

Further Information

Dr Geraint Jones
Research Manager
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Bristol
Merchant Venturers Building
Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK

ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING

The Department

prospective Students