Alternative Architectures for Low-energy Millimeter-wave Antennas in Next-generation Wireless
November 9, 2022 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm CST
Alternative Architectures for Low-energy Millimeter-wave Antennas in Next-generation Wireless:
Recent advances in millimeter wave (MMW) communications have ushered in a new era of high speed wireless data proliferation. Emerging 5G and 6G mobile wireless networks and low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-enabled space internet will make extensive use of the MMW bands. High performance beamforming antennas are essential to the realization of these services and are anticipated to be deployed on a massive scale (by 2030 over 2 million base-stations (BS) and small cells (SC) will be deployed in 5G-MMW infrastructure and by 2040 up to 19 million LEO SATCOM terminals will be installed with end-users). The incumbent phased array antenna (PAA) technology provides exceptional beamforming performance but, due to the high-element-count as well as poor beamformer efficiency at millimeter-waves, PAAs are costly and power-inefficient and thus do not scale well to next-generation antenna concepts like massive/giga-MIMO (1000’s of elements) and cannot meet the price point of user terminals for LEO satcom applications. In this talk I will discuss two alternative beam-scanning approaches which provide high-performance with dramatically reduced power consumption and cost: 1) Switched-beam gradient index (GRIN) lens antennas provides high aperture efficiency over extremely wide bandwidths with low-cost and power consumption. Unfortunately, they suffer from poor performance over scan angle and cannot form arbitrary beams (shape and angle). I will describe our recent efforts to address these limitations including GRIN lens materials and fabrication, design, and hybrid PAA/lens systems which perform like a PAA but consume much less power and can be made low-cost. 2) Low-resolution massive-MIMO arrays as well as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have gained significant attention over the past few years as a means of massively reducing power consumption in large-scale millimeter-wave arrays. I will describe our 1-bit millimeter-wave massive-MIMO receiver array and our new effort in a modulated transmit metasurface.
851 S Morgan St
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Chicago, IL 60607