Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This project will develop innovative Ultra Wideband (UWB) front-end transceiver systems based on the following concepts and approaches: 1) novel composite right/left-handed (CRLH) metamaterial (MM) components (transmission lines, stubs, hybrid couplers, dividers/combiners, etc.), which have been recently shown to exhibit a potential for exceptionally broad bandwidth, and novel MM super-directive antennas; 2) dispersive nonlinear transmission line (NLTL) ultra-short pulse shapers for the generation of highest data-rates and efficient direct-sequence (DS) transmission; 3) substrate integrated circuit (SIC) implementation of MM components/antennas for reduction of cost and enhancement of performances of the transceiver; 4) digital signal processing (DSP) coding, multipath/mutlisystem mitigation and channel capacity optimization. Two different UWB front-end transceivers will be realized and compared: an UWB multiport (UMP) front-end, with excellent potential for software defined radio (SDR) due to its very flexible architecture, and an UWB homodyne (UH) front-end, which is expected to exhibit larger throughputs due to higher sensitivity. While the UMP front-end will be mainly conceived for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) type UWB (using QPSK phase spectra and at least 500 MHz bandwidth), the UH transceiver will be based on the Direct Sequence (DS) UWB approach, in which the integration of an efficient MM UWB pulse shaper will be of paramount importance. This project is of significant importance to the training of graduate students at different level and the outcome of the research will be transferred to our industrial partner for further commercial development.