| NSF Org: |
ECCS Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 19, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | November 21, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1757232 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Jenshan Lin
jenlin@nsf.gov (703)292-7360 ECCS Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2017 |
| End Date: | February 29, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $304,637.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $375,113.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $35,000.00 FY 2019 = $35,476.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
11200 SW 8TH ST MIAMI FL US 33199-2516 (305)348-2494 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
FL US 33199-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
GOALI-Grnt Opp Acad Lia wIndus, EPMD-ElectrnPhoton&MagnDevices, EFRI Research Projects, ENG NNI Special Studies, EARS |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
This project will research innovative approaches to develop methods and fabrication techniques to enable practical access to the millimeter wave spectrum. This is important for handling future cellular data traffic, expected to grow at a rate of 40-70% annually. As existing cellular bands are already crowded, it is necessary to explore other bands, and more specifically millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies. Critical issues for practical millimeter wave transceivers on handhelds are power and bandwidth handling. With this in mind, the goal of this research is to explore power-reduced and hardware-reduced transceivers to realize several concurrent high gain beams for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications and to concurrently overcome propagation losses for cellular connectivity. Achieving these goals is expected to have transformative impact on all aspects of wireless communications. Concurrently, the large available bandwidth at millimeter wave frequencies will enable secure wireless communications systems for large data rate transfers. This research is also in line with the National Broadband Plan aimed at providing every American with affordable access to robust broadband services. Moreover, this project will train students in emerging wireless technologies. Specifically, a variety of outreach activities are planned to attract undergraduates and underrepresented students in engineering, including high school students through summer camps and wireless connectivity projects relating to 1) medical sensors, 2) short distance communication applications and 3) energy harvesting using ambient RF signals. Examples of societal impact include the realization of reliable high bandwidth handhelds and secure wireless communications systems for large data rate transfers.
Several innovations are proposed to enable practical use of the yet unharnessed capacity of the mm-wave spectrum. Among them are: 1) Novel ultra-wideband arrays that incorporate balanced feeds. 2) Hybrid frequency and code division multiplexing for secure high data rate communications to cover an unprecedented 10GHz bandwidth. 3) A beamformer architecture that combines all antenna array signals into a single analog-to-digital (ADC)/digital-to-analog (DAC) converter without loss of signal path identity. This is done by introducing a novel on-site code division multiplexing technique. It is noted that reduction of ADCs and DACs by a factor of 10 or more implies proportional reduction in power usage and back-end circuitry. 4) Hybrid integration of the phased array with complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and/or III-V transceiver and associated digital beamforming processor. Antenna arrays will be fabricated on low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrates and be vertically integrated to ensure the highest possible gain and compactness. 5) Indoor/Outdoor measurements of the aforementioned integrated mm-wave system to characterize the impact of line-of-sight (LOS) versus non-LOS links, range, angle of arrival distributions, pathloss/shadowing, and delay spreads. Such outdoor measurements have yet to be performed at mm-waves using beamforming arrays.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This NSF EARS project developed practical low cost fabrication techniques and low power transceivers for 5G products that will play a key role in the future of ultrawideband software radios for millimeter wave applications. Specifically, this research project allowed the development of demonstration of many components that will be essential to future 5G/6G radios. Among them:
1) New class of ultrawideband millimeter arrays with nearly 50:1 bandwidth, operating up to 95GHz and fabricated using low-cost PCB printing methods.
2) Low power wideband digital beamformers that employ on-site code division multiplexing (OS-CDM) to significantly reduce analog hardware and ADC power by a factor of 8 to 32. The demonstration of this approach for millimeter bands brings forward a practical approach for high data rates millimeter wave networks. The approach relies on the novelty of grouping several antenna array elements into a single ADC converter using coding in the analog domain and decoding in the digital domain. The process is reversed for the transmitter using DACs.
3) High data rate secure communications by exploiting the large bandwidth of the development millimeter wave system. It was demonstrated that secure communication can be realized using 1.3GHz of contiguous bandwidth under multiple interference scenarios with little impact on bit error rates. This was due to employing spread spectrum techniques and channel coding across the large available bandwidth. A hardware set was developed that employed 10 GHz of contiguous bandwidth with several data channels, and operated at 28GHz to demonstrated the developed technologies using high speed ADCs.
4) Wearable RF structures for body-worn communications were also explored through a supplement. As part of this effort, we examined and developed interconnects between textile conductive surfaces and excitation ports. Specifically, conductive ink was used to provide full flexibility to RF structures with no compromise to their performance.
The above achievements come at an opportune time as they can be integrated with ultrafast data converters to push the adoption of direct RF sampling architectures for 5G/6G, and next-gen communications. Indeed, the simplified topology, ease of realization and programming, and cost reductions, make direct RF sampling systems more attractive.
In addition to the above innovations, the project trained 5 graduate (PhD) students at various stages of their schooling, 3 undergraduate students, and 3 post-graduate researchers. Also, a young faculty member participated in the project and received the NSF CAREER awards.
A total of 31 publications were produced based on this project and 1 student did an internship at Motorola, now employed at Apple. A post-doc trained on this project became a faculty member and two undergrads exposed to this project became graduate/PhD students.
Last Modified: 05/27/2020
Modified by: John L Volakis
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