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Far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) has been reconsidered in recent years as practical means to transfer power from outer space where satellites collect solar power with high efficiency using photovoltaic technology and then convert the power to microwaves for beaming to antenna farms at specific locations on earth. Conventional antennas have been the traditional microwaves transducers used for WPT applications. Almost all antennas that were considered for WPT applications were designed in the first place for communication applications where traditional antenna parameters such as gain, directivity and efficiency were considered the most critical. For WPT applications, however, the primary concern is to collect as much power as possible per footprint, based on specific polarization and incident angle.

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Optical links 1 – 100 metres in length require low cost, low power consumption and small size. Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) can be arrayed inexpensively and can be directly modulated, avoiding the need for separate optical modulator components. VCSELs operating at 850nm coupled to multimode fiber offer a compact and inexpensive optoelectronic assembly, and are predominant for short reach optical communication. The key challenge for the transmitter circuit in such systems is to modulate single-ended VCSEL currents up to about 10mA at 25+Gb/s while maintaining bias voltages of approximately 2V across the VCSELs. At the receiver, a key challenge is to provide adequate sensitivity using photodiodes with wide (50um) aperture and, hence, large capacitance. Current commercial transceiver circuits are realized in SiGe BiCMOS, which is advantageous at both the transmitter and receiver, but CMOS offers the potential for higher levels of integration and lower power consumption. Our research efforts on low-power CMOS VCSEL drivers and optical receivers will be presented, including several 65nm CMOS designs.

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To enable a widespread acceptance of millimeter-wave circuits and systems in commercial markets, high density and mass-producible integration techniques need to be developed with low cost. These techniques should deal with challenging issues in the design and development of the RF front-end and baseband components. Prior to doing so, this integration will be made at different level. As it becomes well-known, the SIW technique is definitely a promising candidate in the field of millimeter- and sub-millimeter-waves. However, the full potential of SIW and other integrated waveguide structures can only be exploited by combining them in hybrid SICs. In the presentation, various types of antenna arrays and components including innovative feeding mechanisms made of SIW structures will be presented and discussed. The developed structures are based on two techniques: multi-layer structure and E-plane corner. Monolithic integration based CMOS and MMIC processing platforms will be also discussed. The proposed concepts provide light-weight, low-cost, high performance, and full-integration solutions for imaging and other microwave and millimeter-wave applications. Developed Innovative millimeter wave applications will be presented

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Radio-Analog Signal Processing (R-ASP), inspired from ultrafast all-optical signal processing principles, has recently emerged as a new paradigm for monitoring, manipulating and processing radio signals in real time. Compared to conventional Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques, R-ASP operates on electromagnetic signals directly in their pristine analog form to achieve complex signal processing operations leading to novel microwave/mm-wave systems. It thus provides an attractive and an alternative approach, specially at high frequencies, to overcome the potential drawbacks of DSP techniques, which include high-cost A/D and D/A conversion, high power consumption, low-speed and high complexity. The heart of a R-ASP system is a Phaser, which is a temporally – and sometimes also spatially – dispersive electromagnetic structure whose group delay is designed so as to exhibit the required (quasiarbitrary) frequency function to perform a desired operation, such as for instance, real-time Fourier transformation. The recently developed spatially dispersive phasers based on exotic metasurfaces and metamaterial structures, manipulate and engineer the spatial wavefronts of broadband electromagnetic signals, in addition to their temporal waveforms, transcending them to an exciting new dimension. These phasers can manipulate electromagnetic waves with an unprecedented flexibility, in both space and time, and thereby enable a myriad of microwave applications in communication, radar, instrumentation and imaging, with superior performance or/and functionality. This talk presents an overview of the R-ASP technology, including dispersion-based processing principles, phasing fundamentals and several key applications. The talk will be concluded with a newly developed concept of a perfect dispersive medium and the future roadmap to combat exciting challenges in developing and inventing tomorrow’s radio systems.

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A Cognitive Radio transceiver senses its radio environment and adaptively utilizes free parts of the radio spectrum. CMOS IC-technology is the mainstream technology to implement smart signal processing and for reasons of cost and size it is attractive to also integrate the radio frequency (RF) hardware in CMOS. This lecture discusses radio transceiver ICs designed for cognitive radio applications, with focus on analog RF. Cognitive radio asks for new functionality, e.g. spectrum sensing and more agility in the radio transmitter and flexibility in the receiver. Moreover, the technical requirements on the building blocks are more challenging than for traditional single standard applications, e.g. in bandwidth, programmability, sensing sensitivity, blocker tolerance, linearity and spurious emissions. Circuit ideas that address these challenges will be discussed, and examples of chips and their achieved performance will be given.

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Join for a special panel discussion on the evolution of information technologies. Hear from leaders of industry as they discuss the roles that information technologies play in the worlds of e-commerce, cyber-security, and healthcare. A reception will follow the speaker discussion.