3 Prestigious PhD Student Positions
5G/6G mm-wave Antenna Systems and Optical NetworksAre you looking for high quality doctoral-level training in close collaboration with industry?The National NWO project FREEPOWER (Free-space electromagnetic modulation with focal-plane arrays using non-linear power amplifiers) offers 3 prestigious PhD student positions at Eindhoven University of Technology in the area of antenna systems and optical networks, starting in the summer of 2019 until mid-2023. The FREEPOWER consortium includes leading industries and institutes in the domain of wireless infrastructure. FREEPOWER will provide the PhD students with a comprehensive set of theoretical and practical skills relevant for innovation and long-term employability in a rapidly growing sector. The project is performed in a collaborative effort among two research groups and leverages on the current activities in the H2020 ITNs projects SILIKA, 5G STEP FWD and 5G PPP projects blueSPACE and 5G PHOS all involving strong collaboration with industry.
See this link for an illustration:
https://assets.tue.nl/fileadmin/content/Our_University/Plaatje%20vacature.jpg .
Future generations' of wireless communications (5G/6G) are promising several Gbps data-rates per user for multiple users simultaneously. For this, new frequency bands in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) range are intended to be allocated in order to meet the bandwidth requirements. Due to the line-of-sight nature and high path loss at mm-wave frequencies, a centralized radio-access network (C-RAN) architecture will be used where each cell is populated by several remote antenna stations, called remote units (RU's). The RU's are connected to a central office via front-haul links, for example using fiber-optic cables. However, in existing urban environments, fiber-optic links are often not possible or prohibitively expensive. Here, wireless front-haul links with an intermediate distributed unit (DU) wirelessly feeding multiple RU's from a single fiber connection, are an attractive solution. Especially E-band (71-86 GHz) point-to-point (P2P) and point-to-multipoint (P2MP) systems are generally considered a very attractive choice for this.
However, current E-band P2P systems do not meet the performance (range and beamsteering) and cost demands of vastly deployed RU's. Future E-band front-haul antennas require electronic beamforming to compensate for twist and sway and to enable high-speed P2MP links. Within FREEPOWER we will therefore develop a 100x more power-efficient E-band P2P/P2MP front-haul solution based on the focal-plane array concept. Here, the reflector is fed by a novel phased-array feed, which provides beamsteering and a linear signal transfer using power-efficient non-linear amplifiers. The reduced peak power requirement per element results in the possibility to use low-cost silicon-based semiconductor technology.
The following scientific challenges will be addressed in the FREEPOWER project:
PhD position 1: Introduction of a new concept, LINCA, which is an extension of the LINC concept, to create linear phased-array transmitters to enable mm-wave front-haul links using power-efficient non-linear power amplifiers applied on array level. Our 'out-spacing' concept takes the traditional circuit-level out-spacing concepts towards the electromagnetic domain.PhD position 2: Implementation of the LINCA phased-array feed in a wide-scanning focalplane array (FPA). The active phased array will be a highly integrated solution containing the amplifiers as well as optical-to-electrical converters to directly interface to an optical fiber, a fibre ribbon or multicore optical fiber feeders.PhD position 3: The front-end complexity of the front-haul antenna system is further reduced by using an analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) connection between the central office, the distributed unit and the remote radio units. In this way, the main part of the analog and digital electronics as well as control is located at the central.
This project will result in a technology demonstrator consisting of a FPA which is illuminated by a LINCA cluster with active array elements to provide an E-band front-haul antenna system that can generate an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of at least 65 dBm. The front-haul antenna is fed from a remote central office using analog radio-over-fiber.