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Maintaining an Innovative and Creative WorkplaceEOL knows we cannot fulfill our scientific, engineering and service objectives without capable, intelligent, dedicated and effective personnel. We find a variety of ways to keep our staff challenged, including robust Science and Engineering Visitor Programs through which our skills are honed by the constant exchange of ideas with outside experts as well as our long-running Seminar Series, which EOL staff and outside professionals both are afforded the opportunities to present their expertise that generate stimulation discussion and ultimately, innovation. Science and Engineering Visitor Programs [Highlight]EOL supports NCAR's strategic priority to provide many avenues for professional development by creating Science and Engineering Visitor Programs to allow EOL staff to share developments and approaches with industry and university scientific and engineering researchers. In any given year, EOL hosts upwards of 500 such visitors. This past year included a visit by Dr. Sunil Khatri, an expert in Software Digital Signal Processors from Texas A&M, and one of his Masters level graduate students, Suganth Paul. Dr. Khatri worked with with EOL engineers to develop a reconfigurable, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based radar processing environment. Unlike custom Integrated Circuits (ICs), the functionality of FPGAs can be reconfigured, allowing such a platform to be utilized acrossthe breadth of NCAR's radars, lidars and profilers. The use of such a generic radar processing platform would help reduce engineering development and maintenance costs. Sunil also offered a 10-session course on FPGA programming to EOL engineers. Dr. Khatri is also exploring high performance Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) as a means to perform fast computation for NCAR's products. In addition, during his while visiting EOL he is explored extreme low energy circuit design approaches to enable NCAR's ASA systems to perform energy efficient computation and communication. His masters' student, Suganth Paul, developed code forthe FPGA based radar processor platform.
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