Title: Active Integrated Antennas: Fundamentals and Applications.

Presenter: Dr. Mohammad S. Sharawi, Electrical Engineering Department, Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Date: 20th February 2023.

Time: 09:00 AM IST.

Abstract of the Talk:

Next generation wireless terminals and devices will include large amounts of antennas serving various purposes and standards. This will pose new size and volume constraints on such antennas and their accompanying radio-frequency front-ends (RF-FE). In addition, at higher frequency bands (i.e. millimeter waves), beam-forming (or beam-switching) will be required to provide reliable communication links and avoid constant blockage from nearby obstacles. Traditionally, antennas are designed and optimized to be interfaced to their RF-FE via a 50Ω
input impedance. Circuit and antenna designers were always asked to satisfy this requirement to have a good matching over the band of interest. This scheme does not always provide the best overall system performance. Active antennas can provide better gain, bandwidth and efficiencies if properly designed.

This talk will start with the historical developments of active integrated antennas, their features, importance, applications and design procedures supported with examples from literature. Basic definitions and design aspects will be highlighted for the design of active integrated antennas. Then, it will highlight a new co-design methodology that my group has come up with to co-design active and passive parts simultaneously without the requirement of 50 ohm. This method has been proven very efficient as compared to other conventional methods and relaxes the separate requirements of 50 ohm matching. Examples of this co-design method will be given for narrow-band, wide-band and ultra-wide band-based active integrated antenna designs.

Short bio of the Speaker: 

Mohammad S. Sharawi is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is also a member of the Poly-Grames Research Center at Polytechnique. He was with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia, between 2009-2018. He founded and directed the Antennas and Microwave Structure Design Laboratory (AMSDL) at KFUPM. He was a visiting Professor at the Intelligent Radio (iRadio) Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, during the Summer-Fall of 2014. He was a visiting research Professor at Oakland University during the summer of 2013.

Prof. Sharawi’s areas of research include Multiband Printed Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) Antenna systems, Reconfigurable and Active integrated Antennas, Applied Electromagnetics, Millimeter-wave MIMO antennas and Integrated 4G/5G antennas for wireless handsets and access points. He is pioneering the concepts of Shared aperture and encapsulated antenna systems for 5G applications. He has more than 375 papers published in refereed journals and international conferences, 10 book chapters, one single authored book entitled “Printed MIMO Antenna Engineering,” Artech House, 2014, and the lead author of the recent book “Design and Applications of Active Integrated Antennas,” Artech house, 2018. He has 28 issued and 8 pending patents in the US Patent Office. He is serving as the Associate Editor for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL), IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation (MAP), and an Area Editor for Wiley Microwave and Optical Technology Letters (MOP). He was the Specialty editor of the newly launched Frontiers Journal on Communications and Networking, the System and Test-Bed design section (2020-2022). He served on the Technical and organizational program committees of several international conferences such as EuCAP, APS, IMWS-5G, APCAP, iWAT among many others. Prof. Sharawi is a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) for the Antennas and Propagation Society (APS) for the period of 2023-2025 offering several lectures in advanced antenna topics.