Speaker: Dr.Christophe Caloz, Head of the Electromagnetics Research Group,École Polytechnique de Montréal

Date/Time: Thursday, February 26th 2015, 7.30pm

Location: Ottawa Conference and Event Centre 200 Coventry Road, Ottawa

Organizer: IET Ottawa

Abstract:

Today’s exploding demand for faster, more reliable and ubiquitous wireless connectivity poses unprecedented challenges in radio technology. To date, the predominant approach has been to put increasing emphasis on digital signal processing (DSP). However, while offering device compactness and processing flexibility, DSP suffers of fundamental limitations, such as poor performance above the K band, high-cost A/D conversion, low processing speed and high power consumption.

Recently, Radio Analog Signal Processing (R-ASP) has emerged as a novel paradigm to potentially overcome these issues, and hence address the aforementioned challenges. R-ASP processes radio signals in their pristine analog form and in real time, using “phasers”. A phaser is a temporally – and sometimes also spatially – dispersive electromagnetic structure whose group delay is designed so as to exhibit the required (quasi-arbitrary) frequency function to perform a desired operation, such as for instance real-time Fourier transformation. Phasers can be implemented in Bragg-grating, chirped-waveguide, magnetostatic-wave and acoustic-wave technologies. However, much more efficient phasers, based on 2D/3D metamaterial structures and cross-coupled resonator chains, were recently introduced, along with powerful synthesis techniques. These phasers can manipulate the group delay of electromagnetic waves with unprecedented flexibility and precision, and thereby enable a myriad of applications in communication, radar, instrumentation and imaging, with superior performance or/and functionality. This talk presents an overview of R-ASP technology, including dispersion-based processing principles, historical milestones, phasing fundamentals, phaser synthesis, and many applications.

Biography:

Christophe Caloz received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur en Électricité and the Ph.D. degree from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. From 2001 to 2004, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Microwave Electronics Laboratory, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In June 2004, Dr. Caloz joined École Polytechnique of Montréal, where he is now a Full Professor, the holder of a Canada Research Chair (CRC) and the head of the Electromagnetics Research Group. He has authored and co-authored over 550technicalconference, letter and journal papers, 12 books and book chapters, and he holds several patents. His works have generated about 13,000 citations, and he is a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher. Dr. Caloz is a Member of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Technical Committees MTT-15 (Microwave Field Theory) and MTT-25 (RF Nanotechnology), a Speaker of the MTT-15 Speaker Bureau, the Chair of the Commission D (Electronics and Photonics) of the Canadian Union de Radio Science Internationale (URSI) and an MTT-S representative at the IEEE Nanotechnology Council (NTC). In 2009, he co-founded the company ScisWave, which develops CRLH smart antenna solutions for WiFi. Dr. Caloz received several awards, including the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Post-doctoral Research in 2004, the MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2007, the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2013, the Prix Urgel-Archambault in 2013, and many best paper awards with his students at international conferences. He has been an IEEE Fellow since 2010 and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) since 2014. In 2014, he was elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of AP-S. He is currently also a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Saudi Arabia. His research interests include all fields of theoretical, computational and technological electromagnetics, with a strong emphasis on emergent and multidisciplinary topics, including particularly metamaterials, nano electromagnetics, exotic antenna systems and real-time radio.