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Far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) has been reconsidered in recent years as practical means to transfer power from outer space where satellites collect solar power with high efficiency using photovoltaic technology and then convert the power to microwaves for beaming to antenna farms at specific locations on earth. Conventional antennas have been the traditional microwaves transducers used for WPT applications. Almost all antennas that were considered for WPT applications were designed in the first place for communication applications where traditional antenna parameters such as gain, directivity and efficiency were considered the most critical. For WPT applications, however, the primary concern is to collect as much power as possible per footprint, based on specific polarization and incident angle.

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Optical links 1 – 100 metres in length require low cost, low power consumption and small size. Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) can be arrayed inexpensively and can be directly modulated, avoiding the need for separate optical modulator components. VCSELs operating at 850nm coupled to multimode fiber offer a compact and inexpensive optoelectronic assembly, and are predominant for short reach optical communication. The key challenge for the transmitter circuit in such systems is to modulate single-ended VCSEL currents up to about 10mA at 25+Gb/s while maintaining bias voltages of approximately 2V across the VCSELs. At the receiver, a key challenge is to provide adequate sensitivity using photodiodes with wide (50um) aperture and, hence, large capacitance. Current commercial transceiver circuits are realized in SiGe BiCMOS, which is advantageous at both the transmitter and receiver, but CMOS offers the potential for higher levels of integration and lower power consumption. Our research efforts on low-power CMOS VCSEL drivers and optical receivers will be presented, including several 65nm CMOS designs.

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To enable a widespread acceptance of millimeter-wave circuits and systems in commercial markets, high density and mass-producible integration techniques need to be developed with low cost. These techniques should deal with challenging issues in the design and development of the RF front-end and baseband components. Prior to doing so, this integration will be made at different level. As it becomes well-known, the SIW technique is definitely a promising candidate in the field of millimeter- and sub-millimeter-waves. However, the full potential of SIW and other integrated waveguide structures can only be exploited by combining them in hybrid SICs. In the presentation, various types of antenna arrays and components including innovative feeding mechanisms made of SIW structures will be presented and discussed. The developed structures are based on two techniques: multi-layer structure and E-plane corner. Monolithic integration based CMOS and MMIC processing platforms will be also discussed. The proposed concepts provide light-weight, low-cost, high performance, and full-integration solutions for imaging and other microwave and millimeter-wave applications. Developed Innovative millimeter wave applications will be presented