2017 Activities
The July 6 meeting was held at Texas Instruments Building E, 2900 Semiconductor Drive Santa Clara, CA 95051
The speaker was Prof. Buon Kiong Lau, an Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Lecturer from the Department of Electrical and Information Technology Lund University, Sweden.
Dr. Lau presented a talk on “For Better, For Worse – A Story of Two Dipoles”
Mutual coupling is an important topic in the field of electromagnetics, as many practical applications call for multiple antennas to be located in close proximity to one another. It is also a persistent and fascinating topic, in which many new results and insights continue to be produced over the years. For simplicity, and with no loss in generality, many of the fundamental studies are based on this simple case of two parallel, half-wavelength dipole antennas.
In this lecture, he focused on the mutual coupling of two dipoles in the context of wireless communications. He began by describing several performance metrics for characterizing the performance of two dipoles. He then described the impact of mutual coupling on the dipoles’ performance, as well as different approaches devised to compensate for the negative effects of coupling, illustrated with numerical examples. He also commented on the relevance of the dipole based studies in the general context and some common pitfalls in existing studies on mutual coupling. He finished with an outlook on opportunities for future work in this topic.
Buon Kiong Lau received the B.E. degree (with honors) from the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia, and the Ph.D. degree from the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia, in 1998 and 2003, respectively, both in electrical engineering. During 2000 to 2001, he was a Research Engineer with Ericsson Research, Kista, Sweden. From 2003 to 2004, he was a Guest Research Fellow at the Department of Signal Processing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Since 2004, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, where he is now a Professor in the Communications Group. He also holds a Senior Researcher appointment with the Swedish Research Council since 2010.
Dr Lau’s primary research interests are in various aspects of multiple antenna systems, particularly the interplay between antennas, propagation channels, and signal processing. He has co-authored 34 journal papers (17 in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation), 5 book chapters, over 100 conference papers and 3 patents/patent applications.
Dr. Lau has been an Associate Editor, a Senior Associate Editor and a Track Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, for which he was also a Guest Editor of the “Special Issue on MIMO Technology” (2012) and the Lead Guest Editor of the “Special Issue on Theory and Applications of Characteristic Modes” (2016). In addition, he was the Lead Guest Editor of the “Special Cluster on Terminal Antenna Systems for 4G and Beyond” (2013) for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.
From 2007 to 2010, he was the Co-Chair of Subworking Group 2.2 on “Compact Antenna Systems for Terminals” within EU COST Action 2100. He has also served as a Swedish National Delegate and the Chair of Subworking Group 1.1 on “Antenna System Aspects” within COST IC1004 between 2001 and 2015. From 2012-2015, he was the elected Regional Delegate of European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP) for Region 6. He is also a member of the Education Committee within the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), where he had been the Coordinator for the annual IEEE AP-S Student Design Contest during 2013-2015.
In 2015, Dr. Lau received an award from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation for exceptional performance as an Associate Editor (one of 3 awarded among 46 Associate Editors). His co-authored papers have received several Best Paper Awards, including two CST University Publication Awards in 2010 and 2013
The May 23 meeting was held at Texas Instruments Building E, 2900 Semiconductor Drive Santa Clara
The speaker was Karu Esselle, an Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Lecturer from Australia.
Dr. Esselle presented a talk on “Many names, many advantages – Are resonant cavity antennas the killer planar space-saving approach to get 15-25 dBi gain?”
No other antenna concept has more names. At present these antennas are known as Fabry-Perot cavity resonator antennas, Partial Reflector Surface (PRS) based antennas, Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) Resonator antennas (ERAs) and Two-Dimensional Leaky-Wave Antennas, and more names are forthcoming. Yet they all have more or less the same configuration consisting of a resonant cavity, formed between a partially reflecting superstructure and a fully reflecting (ground) plane. The resonant cavity is excited by a small feed antenna. Hence, they are referred to as resonant cavity antennas (RCAs) in this presentation. This presentation takes the audience through historical achievements of RCA technology, giving emphasis to breakthroughs in the last 10 years. Special attention is given to methods that led to aforementioned bandwidth enhancement and area reduction, dramatic improvement of gain-bandwidth product and unprecedented gain-bandwidth product per unit area demonstrated by RCAs, both theoretically and experimentally. Several choices of superstructures are discussed. The presentation concluded with yet unresolved issues, which could be addressed in future research.
Professor Karu Esselle, IEEE ‘M (1992), SM (1996), F (2016), received BSc degree in electronic and telecommunication engineering with First Class Honours from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and MASc and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a Professor of Electronic Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, Co-Director of WiMed Research Centre and the Past Associate Dean – Higher Degree Research (HDR) of the Division of Information and Communication Sciences. He has also served as a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council and the Division Executive from 2003 to 2008 and as the Head of the Department several times. He is also the chair of the Board of management of Australian Antenna Measurement Facility, and elected Chair of both IEEE New South Wales (NSW) Section, and IEEE NSW AP/MTT Chapter, in 2016 and 2017. Professor Esselle has provided expert assistance to more than a dozen companies including Intel, Hewlett Packard Laboratory (USA) and Cisco Systems (USA). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and IEEE Access.
The May 16 meeting was held at Texas Instruments, 2900 Semiconductor Lane, Santa Clara
The speaker was Levent Gurel, an Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Lecturer from the University of Illinois.
Dr. Gurel presented a talk on “Solution of Extremely Large Forward and Inverse Problems in Computational Electromagnetics: BIG DATA Aspects”
He described accurate formulations of real-life electromagnetics problems with integral equations necessitate the solution of extremely large dense matrix equations. Solutions of such tremendously challenging problems cannot be achieved easily, even when using the most powerful computers with state-of-the-art petascale computing capabilities. Instead, we have been solving some of the world’s largest integral-equation problems in computational electromagnetics by employing fast algorithms implemented on parallel computers. Recently, they achieved the solutions of larger than 1,500,000,000×1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion!) dense matrix equations! Solving the world’s largest problems has important implications for grand-challenge problems in imaging, optics, nanotechnology, bioelectromagnetics, remote sensing, etc.
Prof. Levent Gürel (Fellow of IEEE, ACES, and EMA) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1988 and 1991, respectively, in electrical and computer engineering. He worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, in 1991-94. During his 20 years with Bilkent University, he served as the Founding Director of the Computational Electromagnetics Research Center (BiLCEM) and a professor of electrical engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UIUC. Prof. Gürel is the Founder and CEO of ABAKUS Computing Technologies, a company that is geared towards advancing the use of cutting-edge computing technologies for solving difficult scientific problems with important real-life applications and societal benefits.
The Thursday April 6, 2017 meeting was held at Texas Instruments, 2900 Semiconductor Lane, Santa Clara
This was a joint meeting with the 50Mhz and Up Group and the Microwave Theory and Techniques Section
The speaker was Jeffrey Pawlan. The title of his presentation was “Horizontally Polarized Antennas for Microwave Bands using a Waveguide Structure with an Array of Slot Pairs”
The talk began with the fundamentals of slotted waveguide antennas. A method of approximate design was shown using an equivalent of standard shunt connected series resonant networks. This talk concentrated on how to achieve a truly omnidirectional radiation pattern in the azimuth plane. Methods for improving the pattern were described after giving the electromagnetic explanation why customary slotted waveguide beacon antennas have poor patterns. Several new mechanical realizations were shown.
Jeffrey Pawlan has been an IEEE Senior member of the AP-S, MTT, ComSoc, and the UFFC Societies for 27 years. He has presented many workshops at conferences and published a number of articles. First licensed as WA6KBL in January 1960, he soon realized that he was drawn to VHF, UHF, and microwave equipment He modified a surplus IFF transponder for AM voice operation on 1250MHz and made his own feeds for a surplus dish. Soon he began to experiment with surplus 10GHz reflex klystrons and waveguide pieces. He built his own 1296 EME station and operated for several years. He does portable operation on 10GHz and continues to design new circuits and antennas. He worked as an electronic engineer designing analog, RF, and microwave circuits and also complete systems for more than 47 years. He now spends his time doing volunteer work for the IEEE giving back to the world and especially to engineering students. He has presented almost than 60 lectures on Software Defined Radio around the world.