Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This proposal for research tools and instrumentation grant (RTI) focuses on obtaining hardware and software upgrades to the capabilities of the only reverberation chamber (RC) in an academic institution in Québec. A RC is required to characterize multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems by emulating real multipath channels and environments. MIMO technology is used in current and will be a major technology for future wireless standards. An RC will provide the actual performance of a MIMO system (antennas, transceiver, an actual device, etc) in terms of achievable channel capacities (data bits per second), diversity gains and correlation. ******The instrumentation upgrade will focus on extending the ports connected to the measuring vector network analyser (VNA) from 2 to 4 to have independent parallel simultaneous connections to the two major bands of interest covering 600 MHz 6GHz and 24 GHz 40GHz with the RC. This upgrade will speed up the collection times and extend the lifetime of the chamber and connecting VNA, thus reducing collection costs and maintenance fees. The upgrade consists of a module purchase to extend the VNA ports to have two more ports covering the frequency range from 100Khz 44GHz. In addition, a hardware upgrade on the RC (E600) is required to accommodate this port extension for seamless automatic switching between the two collection bands. A software upgrade is required to accommodate the new ports, as well as speed up the processing and collection times. ******A large community will benefit from this upgrade, including researchers, engineers and students that are in need to measure the performance and characterizes of their new devices and antenna systems for future generation wireless communications for Montréal academic and research institutions and companies.**