KEYNOTE SPEAKER

KEYNOTE 1

Prof. Dr. Atif Shamim

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

On-Chip Antennas: The Last Barrier to True RF System-on-Chip

Antennas are integral part of wireless communication devices and traditionally have remained off the Integrated Circuits (ICs which are also commonly known as chips) resulting in large sized modules. In the last decade, the increased level of integration provided by silicon technologies and emerging applications at millimeter wave frequencies has helped to achieve true System-on-Chip solutions bringing the antennas on the chip. This is because antenna sizes at these frequencies become small enough for practical on-chip realization. Though, there are a number of benefits of putting antennas on-chip, such as monolithic integration resulting in compact systems, robustness due to absence of bond wires or other connection mechanisms between the antenna and the circuits, lower cost due to mass manufacturing in standard CMOS processes, etc. However, there are a number of challenges to overcome, for instance dealing with silicon substrate high conductivity and permittivity (resulting in poor radiation efficiency), metal stack-up and layout restrictions, and on-chip characterization through delicate probes, etc. Furthermore, the co-design of circuits and antenna which sometime have contradicting requirements need knowledge of both the domains.  This talk aims to discuss the above challenges in detail as well as the proposed solutions. In particular, many design examples will be shown for the gain and radiation efficiency enhancement of on-chip antennas through artificial magnetic conductors. The talk will conclude with the upcoming trends in the field of on-chip antennas.

Biography

Atif Shamim received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Carleton University, Canada in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He was an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Graduate scholar at Carleton University from 2007 till 2009 and an NSERC postdoctoral Fellow in 2009-2010 at Royal Military College Canada and KAUST. In August 2010, he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Program at KAUST, where he is currently an Associate Professor and principal investigator of IMPACT Lab. He was an invited researcher at the VTT Micro-Modules Research Center (Oulu, Finland) in 2006. His research work has won best paper awards in IEEE ICMAC 2021, IEEE IMS 2016, IEEE MECAP 2016, IEEE EuWiT 2008, first prize in IEEE IMS 2019 3MT competition and IEEE AP-S Design Competition 2022, finalist/honorable mention prizes in IEEE AP-S Design Competition 2020, IEEE IMS 2017 (3MT competition), IEEE IMS 2014, IEEE APS 2005. He has been selected as the Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE AP-S (2022-2024). He has won the Kings Prize for the best innovation of the year (2018) for his work on sensors for the oil industry. He was given the Ottawa Centre of Research Innovation (OCRI) Researcher of the Year Award in 2008 in Canada. His work on Wireless Dosimeter won the ITAC SMC Award at Canadian Microelectronics Corporation TEXPO in 2007. Prof. Shamim also won numerous business-related awards, including 1st prize in Canada’s national business plan competition and was awarded OCRI Entrepreneur of the year award in 2010. He is an author/co-author of around 300 international publications, an inventor on more than 40 patents and has given close to 100 invited talks at various international forums. His research interests are in innovative antenna designs and their integration strategies with circuits and sensors for flexible and wearable wireless sensing systems through a combination of CMOS and additive manufacturing technologies. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, founded the first IEEE AP/MTT chapter in Saudi Arabia (2013) and served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (2013-2019), and as a Guest Editor for IEEE AWPL Special issue (2019), and is currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology. He serves on numerous IEEE committees such IEEE Technical committees on Antenna Measurements (AP-S), Microwave Controls (MTT-S 13), and Additive Manufacturing (CRFID).

KEYNOTE 2

Prof. Dr. Sungtek Kahng

Dept. of Info. & Telecomm. Eng., Incheon National University (Republic of Korea)

Millimeter-Wave Metamaterials for 5G Mobile, 6G RIS and LEO Satellite Communication Systems

This speech addresses development of advanced antennas for 5G mobile equipment, 6G RIS and satellite wireless communication systems. They are based on metamaterials customized to meet the requirements. Metamaterial components and metasurfaces are used to push the envelope barring reduction of physical sizes and loss from the transmission-line, and reaching high directivity of radiated fields. Specifically, the components are shown to work in Ka-band up to sub-THz band, and reflectrarrays applicable to the RIS and flat lenses transforming the diverging wave to the converging one are presented with technical advantages over the conventional antennas for the 5G/6G infra and satellite communication payloads. The performance of them are characterized by a number of antenna measurement methods from the far-zone field to near-field scanning approaches which include the use of the millimeter-wave probe named TEXWAVE^5G we designed and implemented by ourselves Please, sit back and enjoy the talk!.

Biography

Sungtek Kahng received his Ph.D. degree from Hanyang University, Korea in 2000, with a specialty in Radio Science and Engineering. From 2000 to 2004, he worked for the Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute(briefly, ETRI), and developed Satellite Payloads of GEOs, Computational EM methods and Electromagnetic Field Measurement Techniques. Currently, in Dept. of Info. & Telecomm. Eng. of Incheon National University, he works on WPT devices, PD sensors, EMI/EMC, RF components for UAM Radars and satellites, smart antennas for 5G/IoT networking. He in the committee evaluating Korean Satellite Development Programs appointed by NRF has cooperated mainly with LGE, LIGNEX1, ETRI, KARI, ADD, CAMM, Corning(USA), Samsung, AceTechnology, Hyundai, Amotech, Innertron, and NISSHA(Japan) where he holds a fellow position. Along with roles of IEEE APS STC judge, IEEE APS TC Antenna Measurements, ISAP, APMC, KICS executive director, KIEE journal editor, etc., he served as the ICCR 2022 TPC Chair, Chair of LOC for ICEE 2026 and General Chair for IEEE APCAP 2019.

KEYNOTE 3

Prof. Dr. Stefano Maci

Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, Via Roma 56, 53100, Siena, Italy

Self-Complementary and Duality in Metasurfaces

Metasurfaces (MTS) are thin layers of subwavelength elements which are employed to control the wavefront of guided waves and reflected waves and the transformation from surface wave (SW) to leaky waves (LWs).  Particular cases of MTSs are self-complementary metasurfaces (SCMs), single-layer metal patterns floating in free-space whose elemental cell remains invariant after complementary inversion except for a rotation of the elemental cell in the metasurface plane, where “complementary inversion” means interchanging the metal pattern with the free space.  The concept of SCM can be also extended to impenetrable type of boundary conditions, modifying the shape of the elements with the objective to maintain the basic properties of reflection/transmission and/or SW degeneration of modes. The application of SCMs to antennas opens new possibilities, especially for antennas  in dual-polarization. In this talk, after illustrating the basic principle, various examples will be presented about the use of SCM in microwave frequency range which include gaussian horns, surface-wave based antennas, hyperbolic surfaces, flat reflectors, optical control of the reconfigurability, and propagation which is robust against backscattering.

Biography

Stefano MACI received the Laurea Degree cum Laude at University of Florence in ‘87 and from ‘97 is a Professor at the University of Siena. Since 2000, he was member the Technical Advisory Board of 13 international conferences and member of the Review Board of 6 International Journals. In 2004-2007 he was WP leader of the Antenna Center of Excellence (ACE, FP6-EU) and in 2007-2010 he was International Coordinator of a 24-institution consortium of a Marie Curie Action (FP6). In 2004 he was the founder of the European School of Antennas (ESoA), a post graduate school that presently comprises 34 courses on Antennas, Propagation, Electromagnetic Theory, and Computational Electromagnetics and 150 teachers coming from 15 countries. Since 2004 is the Director of ESoA. Since 2010 he has been Principal Investigator of 6 cooperative projects financed by European Space Agency.

Professor Maci has been a former member of the AdCom of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), associate editor of AP-Transaction, Chair of the Award Committee of IEEE AP-S, and member of the Board of Directors of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP). From 2008 to 2015 he has been Director of the PhD program in Information Engineering and Mathematics of University of Siena, and from 2013 to 2015 he was member of the first National Italian Committee for Qualification to Professor. He has been former member of the Antennas and Propagation Executive Board of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, UK). He founded and has been former Director of the consortium FORESEEN, involving 48 European Institutions. He was the principal investigator of the Future Emerging Technology project “Nanoarchitectronics” of the 8^th EU Framework program, and he is presently principal investigator of the EU program “Metamask”. He was co-founder of 2 Spin-off Companies. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), and EuRAAP distinguished lecturer in the ambassador program. He was recipient of the EurAAP Award in 2014, of the IEEE Schelkunoff Transaction Prize in 2016, of the Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator award in 2016, and of the URSI Dellinger Gold Medal in 2020. He has been TPC Chair of the METAMATERIAL 2020 conference and Chairperson of EuCAP 2023. In the last ten years he has been invited 25 times as key-note speaker in international conferences. He is President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society 2023. 

The research interest of Prof Maci includes high-frequency and beam representation methods, computational electromagnetics, large phased arrays, planar antennas, reflector antennas and feeds, metamaterials and metasurfaces. His research activity is documented in 200 papers published in international journals, (among which 100 on IEEE journals), 10 book chapters, and about 450 papers in proceedings of international conferences. The papers he coauthored have been cited about 10,000 times (h index 50, source: Google Scholar).

KEYNOTE 4

Prof. Dr. Atef Z. Elsherbeni

Electrical Engineering Department, Colorado School of Mines

SAR and Temperature Rise in a Human Head Model due to Electromagnetic Radiation using the FDTD Method

This presentation will focus on the development and simulation procedure to determine the specific absorption rate (SAR) and the corresponding temperature rise due to electromagnetic waves incident on a human head. The human head model is based on medical magnetic resonance images (MRI) that are discretized to fit in the simulation domain. The frequency dependence of the human head tissues is considered in the simulation for multi-frequency field exposure. The sources of the electromagnetic radiation can be a small multiband antenna close to the side of the human head simulating a cell phone, and a dual band antenna embedded in an eyeglass.  The dispersive material formulation of the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is used in order to accurately represent the frequency dependence of the head tissues. A previously developed three terms Debye model of the head tissue, based on experimental results, is utilized in the FDTD simulation. The bioheat differential equation is used to determine the temperature in the head tissues before and after exposure to electromagnetic radiation. Results will show the SAR and temperature distribution in the human head, and will emphasize the efficiency of the developed code for multi-frequency analysis with a single simulation

Biography

Atef Z. Elsherbeni is a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department at Colorado School of Mines. He started his engineering career as a Software and System Design Engineer at Automated Data System Center in Egypt in 1979. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Manitoba University in 1987. He joined the university of Mississippi in 1987 where he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Associate Dean for Research. He moved to Colorado School of Mines in 2013 where he was the Dobelman Distinguished Professor and Department Head of the EECS Department. He was one of the Associate Editors to Radio Science Journal, a past Chair of the Engineering and Physics Division of Mississippi Academy of Science, a past Chair of Educational Activity Committee for IEEE Region 3 Section, the general Chair for the 2014 APS-URSI Symposium, and the past president of ACES Society. Dr. Elsherbeni is the Editor-in-Chief for ACES Journal. He was selected as Finland Distinguished Professor, is one of the current IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Lecturers, is a Life Fellow member of IEEE, and a is Fellow member of ACES.