BIOGRAPHY
received his BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with high-honors in 2007 from Middle East Technical University, Ankara-Turkey. In summer 2006, he worked as an undergraduate researcher at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). He is currently in his third year pursuing a PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Professor Clark Nguyen. Mehmet Akgul's current research interests are micromechanical filter design for RF channel selection and fabrication of MEMS devices, and in the long term to realize a fully micromechanical RF transceiver. He is expected to graduate in 2013.

A Micromechanical RF Channelizer [BPN434]
Vibrating mechanical tank components, such as crystal and SAW resonators, are widely used
for frequency selection in communication systems because of their high Q and exceptional
stability. However, being off-chip components, these devices pose an important bottleneck against
the ultimate miniaturization and performance of wireless transceivers. This project aims to
explore the use of capacitively transduced micromechanical circuits to realize micromechanical
mixer-filters with reconfigurable attributes. With their substantial size, cost and performance
advantages, these devices can be used to realize a bank of tunable/switchable micromechanical
filters for multi-band RF channel selection. By replacing all off-chip components with
micromachined passive elements, micromechanical mixer-filters offer an alternative set of
strategies for transceiver miniaturization and improvement. In the long term, this overall
project aims to demonstrate an RF channelizer utilizing micromechanical elements in its signal
path, exclusively, that presents one of the keys to eventually realizing a cognitive radio.