Heydari Explains Emerging 5G Technologies on IEEE Lecture tour

Submitted by Lori Brandt on December 12, 2014 - 10:10am

http://www.eng.uci.edu/news/2014/12/heydari-explains-emerging-5g-technologies-ieee-lecture-tour

Imagine downloading a movie to your smartphone in less than a second. That’s the potential of the next generation (5G) of cellular network technology. Researchers say it will allow wireless transfer of data 10 times faster than the current 4G network. It will also have more capacity and better reach with multiple improved smaller antennas.

“The fifth generation (5G) cellular networks are coming,” explains Payam Heydari, a UC Irvine electrical engineering professor whose expertise is in the design and analysis of novel terahertz, millimeter-wave and radio-frequency integrated circuits, technologies that could revolutionize power-efficient wireless sensor networks.

As an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Solid-State Circuits Society, Heydari spoke about the challenges and solutions of developing 5G technologies with engineering students and faculty at three East Coast universities: Lehigh, Princeton and Columbia.

“Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz (THz) bands are underutilized regions of the electromagnetic spectrum that have generated a great deal of excitement for future systems that would be able to achieve very high speed wireless data transfer as well as wideband sensing/imaging applications,” Heydari explains. “The shorter wavelength associated with these bands is appealing since the physical dimensions of the antenna and associated electronics can be smaller, making it possible to design multiple antenna structures that can emit signals in various directions and even bounce off buildings.”

On the lecture tour, Heydari presented an overview of recent advances in designing silicon-based integrated circuits. He discussed two case studies from UCI’s Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs. One is the first 210-gigahertz wireless transceiver in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technologies that enables 20 gigabit-per-second wireless data transfer, and the second is the world’s highest frequency synthesizer at 300 gigahertz with a wide –tuning range, allowing very high resolution radar sensors for surveillance and security systems.

This is a crucial time in the development of 5G. “We are talking about what technologies will define this next generation,” says Heydari. “Will 5G be just an evolution of 4G, or will emerging technologies cause a disruption requiring a wholesale rethinking of entrenched cellular principles?”

IEEE Distinguished Lecturers are engineering professionals who lead their fields in new technical developments that shape the global community. They serve two-year terms and deliver lectures at chapter meetings and regional seminars around the world.

DoD basic research discovers new spectroscopic signatures from the "stuff of life"

Physics professor Elliott Brown and graduate student Anna Lukawska work in the lab on nanobiological characterizations.

http://phys.org/news/2012-05-dod-basic-spectroscopic-signatures-life.html

Naturally, DNA sensing and identification has become a very important technology in such areas as biology, medicine and law enforcement. But positive identification without ambiguity is difficult because DNA is so sparse in the human organism and because it shares many of the same chemical bonds as other more common biomolecules–proteins and polysaccharides.

So traditional spectroscopic methods, such as infrared transmission, cannot distinguish DNA from these other molecules. More elaborate techniques are necessary, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) followed by gel electrophoresis, which are expensive and time-consuming.

Fortunately, the large size of DNA molecules makes them amenable to other spectroscopic methods in the THz region of the electromagnetic spectrum–a region well below the infrared in frequency but well above common radio and radar frequencies.

Wright State University researchers led by physics professor Elliott Brown have been investigating these unique THz DNA signatures through a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) funded by the U.S. Army Research Office. Their multi-year $600,000 grant has recently identified several unique and surprisingly strong signatures from DNA molecules between 0.7 and 1.0 THz.

“The surprise is that we have recently measured these DNA signatures under physiological conditions in which the DNA was suspended in an aqueous buffer solution very similar to that in living cells,” Brown said. “Previously, the strong THz absorption by liquid water was thought to be too strong to observe signatures from any suspended molecular species.”

So far, Brown said, the signatures appear unique to the DNA molecule at hand, be it single-stranded or double-stranded DNA.

“The caveat is that so far we have only observed relatively short DNA strands well under the length of the human genome,” he said. “But we are moving in that direction.”

The research project is headed by the University of California-Irvine, and along with Wright State University has collaborators at Marshall University, Yale University and the University of Chicago. The MURI Grant funds the research for up to five years.