Newsletter August 2019 Issue

Interference-Cancelling Fiber Bragg Grating Delay Lines

In-band full-duplex communication will require suppressing each node’s self-interference. This is difficult in realistic multipath environments. A new noise-cancelling application of fiber Bragg grating delay lines, operating at 2.5 GHz with instantaneous bandwidths of 10-1000 MHz, provided up to 10 dB of additional cancellation.
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URI Team Wins IMS 2019 Quadplexer Student Competition

Yuchen Cao’s University of Rhode Island team won the IMS 2019 “Carrier Aggregation BAW Quadruplexer” design competition. The team of Andreas Bogner from FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, came in second. The contest, sponsored by MTT-2 (Microwave Acoustics), Qorvo, and Keysight Technologies, is one of 11 design competitions held during Microwave Week.
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Wireless Power Transfer Through 10 Meters of Seawater

Why haul autonomous underwater vehicles to recharge their batteries? Researchers have designed a wireless magnetic-resonance-based power transfer system with multiple hydrosealed coils, using bandpass filter theory. The demonstration system successfully transferred power through more than 10 meters of seawater at a rate on the order of 1-100 Watts.
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Humanitarian Technology SIG Leaders at IMS 2019

SIGHT (Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology) Steering Committee Chair Sampathkumar Veeraraghavan (center, with chairs Shiban Koul, left, and Jose Rayas-Sanchez, right) delivered his keynote on “IEEE SIGHT – Global Partnership Strategy to Drive Sustainable Development Projects” at the MTT-S chapter chair meeting at June’s IMS 2019 in Boston.
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Metal-Embedded Chip Assembly Boosts RF Performance

A heterogeneous technique for multi-chip modules integrates passive components in a metal-embedded chip assembly (MECA) process. Measurements confirm simulations showing that photolithographically defined interconnects can outperform wire bonds from 10 to 100 GHz, with gain and power-added efficiency improvements of up to 3 dB and 3.2%, respectively.
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Last Call for MTT-S Student Satellite Challenge

1 September is the deadline for entries in the MTT-Sat Challenge, a worldwide competition for teams of undergraduate and graduate students to design and build radio frequency and microwave hardware for small satellites. The most promising designs will undergo space environmental qualification testing and could earn a cubesat launch.
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Input-Reflectionless Bandpass/Bandstop Filters and MuX

A coupling-matrix design approach for novel input-reflectionless RF/microwave bandpass and bandstop filters yields circuits in which a single resistively terminated multi-band bandstop branch can absorb any input-signal energy not transmitted by the multiplexer channels (in their common stopband regions). This produces quasi-reflectionless characteristics at the input.
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15 October Deadline for MTT-S Fellowships/Scholarships

The deadline for Graduate Fellowships and Undergraduate Scholarships is 15 October. Graduate awards include a US$6,000 scholarship and up to US$1,000 to travel to IMS 2020. Undergraduate awards include a US$1,500 scholarship, and up US$1,000 for travel to IMS 2020 or a regional MTT-S conference. Don’t miss the opportunity.
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Multi-Target Vital Sign and Location Detection

A new architecture self-injection-locked quadrature radar sensor (based on a metamaterial leaky-wave antenna, or MTM LWA) simultaneously detects vital signs and locations in multiple targets. Angular information, distance (obtained by frequency-shift keying), and vital signs (extracted from Doppler frequency-shift data) were produced for two targets, with results that agreed with ground truth.
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Coming Up: mmWaves & THz; RF Integration

Upcoming MTT-S-sponsored meetings include: Millimeter Waves and Terahertz Technologies (UCMMT, London, 20-22 Aug.); Radio-Frequency Integration (RFIT, Nanjing, 28-30 Aug.); Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves (IRMMW-THz, Paris, 1-6 Sep.); Problems of Electromagnetic and Acoustic Wave Theory (DIPED, Lviv, Ukraine, 12-14 Sep.); RFID Technology and Applications (RFID-TA, Pisa, 25-27 Sep.) , and more.
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