FALL SEMINAR 2005

(Organized Professor Zhi Ding)

September 30 “Overview of FLO™ Technology – Optimized Mobile Multicast Solution” Dr. Fuyun Ling, Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA Abstract: To address the challenges of delivering mobile multimedia simultaneously to millions of wireless consumers in a cost effective way, QUALCOMM developed a new multicasting technology, known as Forward Link Only (FLO™) technology. FLO technology is base on OFDM and designed from the ground up for mobility applications to meet demands for wireless multimedia services. In this talk, we first describe the motivation of developing a new technology to satisfy the requirements for multimedia multicasting for mobiles. MediaFLO system and its physical layer, i.e., FLO technology, are then introduced. The designs of FLO technology are described in detail to show how it meets such requirements. Bio: Fuyun Ling received his B. S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1968, and his MS and Ph. D. degrees from Northeastern University, Boston, Mass., USA, in 1981 and 1984 respectively. From 1984 to 1998, he was with Motorola Inc. working on research and development of various wireline and wireless communication technologies and products. In 1998, he joined Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego, California, as a Vice President of Technology and worked on research and development of new wireless communication technologies. Since 2003, he has been working on MediaFLO project and is currently responsible for FLO PHY Layer specification and development. Throughout his career, Dr. Ling has been working on digital communications and digital signal processing and their application to wireless and wireline communications. He holds over 50 US Patents with a number of other patent applications pending. He has also published over 70 papers and two books all in his technical areas. He is an Adjunct Professor of Tsinghua University and a Fellow of IEEE. October 7 “Terahertz Technology in Outer and Inner Space” Professor Peter H. Siegel, Senior Research Scientist, Beckman Institute, Division of Biology, Caltech Abstract: After more than 30 years of niche applications in the space sciences area, the field of Terahertz Technology is entering a true Renaissance. While major strides continue to be made in submillimeter wave astronomy and spectroscopy, the past few years have seen an unprecedented expansion of terahertz applications, components and instruments. Broad popular interest in this unique frequency domain has emerged for the first time, spanning applications as diverse as biohazard detection and tumor recognition. Already there are groups around the world who have applied specialized Terahertz techniques to disease diagnostics, recognition of protein structural states, monitoring of receptor binding, performing label-free DNA sequencing and visualizing contrast in otherwise uniform tissue. A commercial terahertz imaging system has recently started tests in a hospital environment and new high sensitivity imagers with much deeper penetration into tissue have begun to emerge. Solicitations for more sophisticated instruments and enabling terahertz components have filtered into US agency proposal calls from DoD and NASA, to NSF and NIH, and many new research groups have sprung up, both in this country and in Europe and Asia. This talk will broadly survey terahertz technology from its cradle applications in space science and spectroscopy to more recent biomedical and chemical uses. Bio: Peter H. Siegel obtained a BS in astronomy and physics from Colgate University, Hamilton NY in 1976, a Masters in Physics and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1978 and 1983 respectively. He has been involved in the analysis and development of millimeter-and submillimeter-wave sensors for nearly 30 years. He began his career in millimeter wave technology in 1975 as a summer student at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, working with astronomer Patrick Thaddeus and electrical engineer Tony Kerr on low noise receivers. In 1983 he moved up in frequency to the submillimeter, working as a National Research Council Fellow on THz planar antenna arrays. From 1984-87 Dr. Siegel was employed at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where he worked with Sandy Weinreb and the millimeter wave receiver group in Charlottesville Virginia, maintaining the Kitt Peak National Radio Observatory. He moved to JPL in 1987 to work on advanced technology development for NASA astrophysics applications. At JPL, Dr. Siegel naturally became involved in several satellite instrument applications, including a very successful Earth observing platform that returned early data on the Antarctic ozone hole and chemical processes in the stratosphere. In 1993 he founded the JPL Submillimeter Wave Advanced Technology team (SWAT), a group of 20 to 25 engineers and scientists working on the development of submillimeter-wave technology for NASA's near and long term astrophysics, Earth remote sensing, and planetary mission applications. At JPL, Dr. Siegel has led or co-I'd more than sixty R&D programs as well as developing and delivering hardware for four major space flight instruments. Recently Dr. Siegel joined the staff at Caltech as a Senior Scientist at the Beckman Institute, Division of Biology, where he is working on biological applications of THz technology. He maintains a joint appointment as the Technical Group Supervisor for SWAT at JPL, where he continues to propose and work on space applications of THz technology. Dr. Siegel and his JPL team have won numerous awards for their technical achievements and are internationally recognized as leaders in THz technology development. Dr. Siegel is a member of AAAS, Chair of IEEE MTT Committee 4 - Terahertz Technology, Vice-Chair of the international organizing committee of the Symposium on Infrared and Millimeter Waves (IRMMW) and an elected Fellow of the IEEE. October 21 “Controlled Synthesis and Integration of Semiconductor Nanowires” Dr. Sungsoo Yi, Molecular Technology Laboratory, Agilent Laboratories Abstract: One-dimensional nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to their unique physical properties and potential applications in electronics, photonics and life science. Although individual nanodevices based on CNTs and semiconductor NWs have been demonstrated, methods that can enable assembly and integration of these building blocks into various device architectures over in a controlled manner need to be developed further in order to realize their full potential in a wide range of applications. In this presentation, I first demonstrate the fabrication of large-scale arrays of individually seeded, electrically addressable Si NWs with controlled dimension, placement, and orientation by utilizing both bottom-up and top-down approaches. Si NWs are an especially promising candidate for developing biochemical sensors and high-speed field effect transistors because of their several appealing properties. A single Si NW was successfully grown from each lithographically defined catalyst site in the array. The diameter, position and density of Si NWs can be controlled to create desired arrays through lithographic means. The as-grown Si NWs on the SiO2 surface were randomly oriented and ion beam irradiation was employed to align the Si NWs to desired direction. I then present the results of the epitaxial growth of highly aligned, single-crystalline InP NWs on Si substrates. There has been a great deal of interests in the heteroepitaxial growth of III-V compound semiconductors on Si, because the integration of high-performance III-V materials with the dominant Si technology could open many new applications in optoelectronics. However, fundamental issues such as large lattice and thermal expansion mismatches and differences in crystal structures have hampered epitaxial integration of III-V materials on Si. I demonstrate bridging of InP nanowires laterally grown between two vertical, (111)-oriented Si surfaces. This method of forming connected nanowires offers a new approach to the integration of III-V nanoelectronic and photonic devices with Si and provides a new degree of freedom in the design of heterojunction nanodevices combined with Si technology. Bio Dr. Sungsoo Yi is a scientist at Agilent Laboratories. He received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did a postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since joining Agilent Laboratories, he has been working on the development of various III-V compound semiconductors such as InP/GaAsSb-based heterojunction bipolar transistors and terahertz light source materials using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). His current research focus is on the synthesis of semiconductor nanowires and carbon nanotubes using chemical vapor deposition for optoelectronic and life science applications. November 4 “RF MEMS for Commercial and Defense Applications” Professor Gabriel Rebeiz, ECE Department, University of California, San Diego Abstract: The development of RF MEMS switches has accelerated considerably over the past several years, and currently there are several switches which have been tested to 100 billion cycles with no failures. However, it is still hard to package these devices and fundamental questions regarding the need of a hermetic package and the failure modes of RF MEMS switches under high power conditions are not well understood. The talk will present the latest work in high isolation switch networks, phase shifters and tunable filters. It will also present detailed modeling on the intermodulation distortion of MEMS devices and how they are 60-90 dB better than GaAs devices. The talk will conclude with the latest research areas in RF MEMS switches, varactors and tunable networks. Bio Gabriel M. Rebeiz (Fellow, IEEE) earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and is currently a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include applying micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) for the development of novel components and sub-systems for radars and communication systems. He is also interested in SiGe RFIC design for receiver applications, and in the development of planar antennas and microwave/millimeter-wave front-end electronics for communication systems, automotive collision-avoidance sensors, and X- to W-band phased arrays. Prof. Rebeiz was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in April 1991 and the URSI International Isaac Koga Gold Medal Award for Outstanding International Research in August 1993. Prof. Rebeiz was selected as the 1997-1998 Eta-Kappa-Nu EECS Professor of the Year. He also received the 1998 Amoco Foundation Teaching Award, given yearly to one faculty at the University of Michigan, for best undergraduate teaching. Prof. Rebeiz is the co-recipient with his student Scott Barker, of the IEEE 2000 Microwave Prize, and the IEEE MTT 2003 Outstanding Young Engineer Award. He is the author of the book RF MEMS: Theory, Design and Technology, Wiley, 2003 December 2 “Ontage-Optimal Relaying” Professor David Tse, Department of EECS, Berkeley, California Abstract: In a slow fading wireless channel, cooperation between nodes can be used to increase diversity by helping each other to relay information. The optimal relaying performance is characterized by the outage capacity of the channel. We analyse the outage capacity of a 3-node relay channel with independent Rayleigh-faded links and half duplex constraint , i.e. the relay cannot transmit and receive at the same time. We present optimal relaying strategies in both the high and the low SNR regimes. This is joint work with A. Salman Avestimehr. Bio: David Tse received the B.A.Sc. degree in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories. Since 1995, he has been at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently a Professor. He received a 1967 NSERC 4-year graduate fellowship from the government of Canada in 1989, a NSF CAREER award in 1998, the Best Paper Awards at the Infocom 1998 and Infocom 2001 conferences, the Erlang Prize in 2000 from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the IEEE Communications and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award in 2001, and the Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2003. He was the Technical Program co-chair of the International Symposium on Information Theory in 2004, and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2001 to 2003. He is a coauthor, with Pramod Viswanath, of the text "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication". His research interests are in information theory, wireless communications and networking.