Communications and Computing with Microwave Networks

Ziel

Modern systems rely on digital circuits, computing, and signal processors that operate on binary values, offering advantages such as precision, versatility, robustness. Yet, digital processors face major limitations as high power consumption and limited speed. Despite digital signal processing being widely adopted today, analog computing is making a comeback thanks to its ability to perform energy-efficient and massively parallelized computations.
The overarching goal of this project is to pioneer and devise the foundations of a new type of analog computing architecture, namely based on microwave networks, compliant with physics, circuit and information theoretic principles such that some computing, communication, and signal processing tasks at microwave frequencies can be faster while being more computational, hardware, and energy efficient than if performed digitally.
I propose the disruptive concept of Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC) as a very general model of a computer exploiting the propagation of analog signals in a microwave network, offering exceptionally low computational complexity - unimaginable with conventional digital computers.
The major scientific challenge is the current lack of a theoretical and algorithmic framework for designing and analyzing MiLAC. Without such a framework, novel, optimal and efficient devices and architectures for computing of signal processing and communications tasks in the analog domain will remain elusive.
To address this challenge, I propose to take the first major steps towards establishing the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of MiLAC for function computation, guide the modelling, algorithm and protocol designs of new MiLAC-based telecom architectures, and demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of MiLAC-aided communications.
The results of this project will open a new research frontier in communications and computing and push the boundaries of current knowledge in neighbouring domains.