Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

One of the most promising recent developments in the wireless world is the move towards ultrawide-band (UWB) pulse-based communication, spurred on by recent steps being taken to enable the unlicensed use of the required frequency band around the world. The proposed three year project oversees the development of several novel passive microwave structures tailored to the needs of emerging UWB systems. This theoretical and experimental research will allow the two university teams from INRS-EMT and McGill Univ., in collaboration with their industrial partner Apollo Microwaves, to lead Canadian and worldwide efforts in developing cost-effective, high-performance solutions for the emerging UWB market. Specifically, our research is directed toward solving the problem of generating UWB pulses WITH ARBITRARILY DEFINED SHAPES, which is of fundamental importance for the future development of UWB-based applications. Our approach is based on a new class of microwave filters featuring electromagnetic bandgaps (EBGs), which are simple to implement in a wide variety of well-established microwave technologies and offer unprecedented design flexibility. Research effort will be directed as follows: (i) Accurate and general synthesis tools will be developed for the design of customized UWB-oriented passive structures; (ii) Simple and practical static UWB arbitrary pulse-shaping filters based on EBGs in coaxial-line and ridge waveguide technologies will be designed, fabricated and characterized; (iii) Fully-reconfigurable UWB arbitrary pulse generators will be designed, implemented and tested. This will have a dramatic impact in such diverse UWB-candidate applications as wireless telecom, military radar, sensing networks and biomedical imaging. The flexibility of our approach and the maturity of the microwave technologies in which our concepts can be implemented will yield cost-efficient, mass-producible structures amenable to commercialization. Finally, the new knowledge generated from this project and the training of highly qualified personnel associated to the different stages of this work will certainly contribute to enhance Canada's global competitiveness in high-technology sectors.