Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MyWave (Efficient Millimetre-Wave Communications for mobile users)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-10-01 bis 2023-09-30
MyWave is a European funded Marie Curie project that started October 1, 2019, with partners from Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands. Its main purpose was to train 15 early stage researchers (ESRs, PhD students) to become experts in key technologies for future mobile telecommunication systems. Throughout the training programme, the ESRs worked on an individual research topic that is of high relevance for the successful further development of next generation mobile telecommunication systems (5G and beyond). Each ESR spend at least 18 months at an industrial partner. In this way, the outcome of the research directly benefited the European industry, while the ESRs gained experience in an industrial work environment.
Scientifically, several achievements were made on very divers topics. In order to aid the research and design of signal processing algorithms for millimeter-wave communication, an automated testbed suitable for beyond-5G distributed MIMO experiments was developed. Using this system, co-located and distributed MIMO communication antenna configurations were compared in a real in-door environment. The results show that distributed MIMO provides significantly more uniform power distribution and better overall MIMO capacity compared to co-located MIMO.
With respect to millimeter-wave electronics, different common and promising PA architectures were analyzed under time-varying load conditions, just like in active antenna array systems. Their sensitivity in terms of linearity, efficiency and output power was compared under LTE signal excitation in an attempt to identify the most suitable PA architecture to be integrated in active antenna systems.
For the air interface, various types of antenna elements as potential candidates for wideband and wide-scan arrays at W-band were investigated and also a fundamental research question has been answered: Can the use of Huygens’s source as antenna element decrease the negative effects of lossy silicon for on-chip antennas, as was demonstrated in several non-silicon PCB designs? The numerical comparison of an electric dipole, a magnetic dipole and a Huygens source antenna that was conducted as part of the MyWave project showed that there is no apparent advantage. Instead, the work has resulted in a proposal for another definition for a Huygens source in multi-layer structures.
These results have been presented at leading international conferences, i.e. the International Microwave Symposium (IMS), the IEEE Topical Conference on RF/Microwave Power Amplifiers for Radio and Wireless Applications (PAWR) and the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP). The links to those as well as all other publications and deliverables are available on the project website.
The research work in the MyWave project resulted so far into 29 scientific papers that were presented at conferences and were published in Journal. The work also resulted in 3 patent applications covering technologies that are further being exploited by the industrial partners. All results were presented as part of the 5G Symposium closing event.
In addition to academic research and thanks to their close collaboration with industry, the ESRs were able to identify essential research questions that are of high relevance to the commercial sector. They also received guidance on how their research could be potentially used in commercial deployments. Moreover, the exposure to industry taught the PhD students practical approaches that are common in industrial settings but cannot be taught at universities, e.g because they require a complete system solution or access to an advanced product portfolio. Two ESRs accepted job offers from the project industry partners. Furthermore a start-up company was created based on project results and new research projects were defined from the network that was created via the MyWave project.