Next Event:

Professor Rahmat-Samii will present his work on "Modern Antennas for MIMO Applications" in our upcoming meeting. This meeting will be held on May 22nd, 1:30 PM at the Sigma Conference Room of Motorola in Schaumburg, IL. This talk is followed by a tour of Motorola's innovation center.

- Refreshment is provided by Motorola

Antennas play paramount roles in an optimal design of the handheld, wearable and implantable devices used in today’s communications-centered marketplace. Antenna engineers are constantly challenged with the temptation to search for optimum designs in both miniaturization aspect and also acceptable performance. The ever increasing advances in computational power and engineered metamaterials have fueled this temptation. The brute force design methodologies are systematically being replaced by the state-of-the-art Evolutionary Optimization (EO) techniques. In recent years, EO techniques are finding growing applications to the design of electromagnetic systems of increasing complexity. Among various EO’s, nature inspired techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have attracted considerable attention. GA utilizes an optimization methodology which allows a global search of the cost surface via the mechanism of the statistical random processes dictated by the Darwinian evolutionary concept. PSO is a robust stochastic evolutionary computation technique based on the movement and intelligence of swarms of bees looking for the most fertile feeding location. This presentation will focus on: (a) an engineering introduction to GA and PSO with special emphasis on parallel computational aspects, (b)demonstration of the potential applications of GA’s and PSO’s to a variety of antenna designs applicable in personal communication arena, (c) presentation of simulated and measured results for wideband and multiband antennas, MIMO antennas for laptops and handheld devices, implanted antennas, wearable antennas, low profile and miniaturized antennas using EBG and engineered metamaterials, antennas on chip, etc. Representative examples will also be shown including the effects of human interactions.

Future Event:

Professor Wang will present his work on "Si and Compound MMICs in Millimeter-wave Regime and Related Issues for System on Chip (SOC) and/or System in Package (SIP) Applications" in our upcoming meeting. This meeting will be held on Aug 3rd, 3:00 PM at the Sigma Conference Room of Motorola in Schaumburg, IL.

The anticipated presentation will cover the current status and future trends of millimeter-wave MMICs, including those using III-V compound (GaAs, InP, GaN, etc.) and Si-based (CMOS, SiGe HBT and BiCMOS) MMIC technologies. Millimeter-wave MMICs used to be applied to military and astronomy systems for long time and started to be utilized for civil applications in the decade, such as communications and automotive radars. The evolution of IC technologies has enabled the performance of Si-based MMICs over 100 GHz, even in standard bulk CMOS processes. This is believed to have a major impact in the future development of millimeter-wave systems. Since low-cost mass-production potential pushes forward the technology, a very high integration of circuit functions on a chip, such as RF, base-band circuitry, automatic-control for a steady operation, and maybe even the antenna, etc. should be included, and thus the system on chip (SOC) issues should be addressed, especially in MMW regime. Moreover, millimeter-wave packaging cost always dominated in the module development. In order to simplify the assembly and reduced cost, the concept of system in package (SIP) has been proposed. This presentation will also survey the current technologies for SOC and SIP and discuss related issues and challenges.

- Refreshment is provided by Motorola

Previous Event:

Professor Balanis presented his work on "Smart Antennas for Wireless Communication Systems and Networks" on Monday, April 9th, 3:30PM-5:30 at the Northwest Conference Room in IL02 building of Motorola in Schaumburg, IL.

Note: This event was hosted by Motorola, however many IEEE members attended from outside Motorola.

ABSTRACT
The presentation reviewed antenna technology along with the associated signal processing algorithms for use in wireless communications systems. Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest on improving system capacity and increasing coverage area in wireless communications using smart antennas. Smart antenna technology is being considered for mobile platforms such as automobiles, cellular phones (mobile unit), and laptops. The results presented here are part of a larger project that considers this antenna system in the context of reconfigurable broadband (high-speed) networks. Although the design of such a system entails several other tasks (as the design of network protocols, feed network, and physical layer communications algorithms), this presentation concentrates on the antenna design and on the development of an efficient adaptive algorithm for beamforming. The objective is to design an adaptive antenna that ideally directs the maximum radiation of the pattern toward the signal-of-interest (SOI) and ideally places nulls toward the signal-not-of-interest (SNOI). The impact of a smart antenna system design on network throughput and communication system BER is also examined. Mutual coupling, which usually has a deleterious impact on the performance of a smart antenna system, can be accounted and improved performance can be achieved.

Note: This meeting is free for all IEEE members, however you should send an email to aryanfar@ieee.org so we get an estimate of number of attendees, prepare your visitor badge and send you detailed address.