2012 has started off great!  Lots of exciting opportunities down the road including a collaboration between UT-Austin and New York University (NYU).  I am now living in Brooklyn, New York to help foster relations between the two universities and with industry as well as continuing to develop the next generation of wireless technology for my PhD completion.  I'll be helping to build a collaboration with Polytechnic Institute of NYU (NYU-Poly), NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU School of Medicine, and UT-Austin.  New York City demands extraordinary performance from new wireless technology.  The urban landscape is very unique and if new wireless devices can be successfully tested here, then the devices will work anywhere in the world! 

I'm looking forward to an exciting year of changing the world!  Hook 'em Horns!

The 2010-2011 school year has been an eventful one.  Had several papers accepted to conferences and prestigious journals.  The conferences attended included the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference in Ottawa, Canada in Sept. 2010, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio in Oct. 2010, and the IEEE International Solid State and Circuits Conference in San Francisco, California, in Feb. 2011.  I was also privileged to visit MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts in March 2011 as a possible future employer.  MIT LL is a federally-funded R&D center with an amazing facility and amazing technical staff solving some of the greatest national security problems.  In Oct. 2010 and Sept. 2011, I attended the Marconi Society Symposiums in Menlo Park, California in 2010 and La Jolla, California in 2011.  The 2010 Marconi Prize recipients were Charles Geschke and John Warnock, co-founders of Adobe Systems, Inc. and the 2011 Marconi Prize recipients were Irwin Jacobs and Jack Wolf.  It was a great honor to participate in these events and meet the Marconi fellows and I have the deepest respect for all these individuals and their great contributions to society.

In May 2011, I successfully advanced to PhD candidacy and am now in full-time research mode.  As I begin the final phase of my PhD and write my dissertation, I look back at how I arrived here and thank all the people in my life who inspired me and supported me to be here. I thank those that have provided me the rare opportunities to do this.  I'm forever grateful for their financial, moral, and emotional support. 

The Summer of 2011 was also eventful.  I continued my research at UT and also presented a conference paper at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium in Baltimore, Maryland.  I also attended the Wireless @ Virginia Tech Symposium in Blacksburg, Virginia and was also able to visit an IBM circuit fabrication plant in Burlington, Vermont.  IBM provides state-of-the-art 45nm/32nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) fabrication technology for circuit designers which I am using in the final phase of my PhD.  During Summer, I also helped co-author a paper that was accepted and published in a very prestigious journal, the Proceedings of the IEEE.  This paper with 200 references outlines the state-of-the-art in 60 GHz wireless communications and discusses a vast array of areas including circuits, wireless propagation, standards, and antennas. Full Citation: Rappaport, T.S., Murdock, J.N., Gutierrez, F., "State of the Art in 60-GHz Integrated Circuits and Systems for Wireless Communications," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol.99, no.8, pp.1390-1436, Aug. 2011.

Fall 2011 has been busy.  Using the IBM 45nm SOI technology, I designed an integrated circuit with on-chip antennas at 180 GHz.  Due to atmospheric and water absorption, 180 GHz is a frequency we forecast to be the next area of interest for short-range, high-bandwidth communications in about 10 years. At these frequencies, antenna sizes are sub-millimeters in size and my circuit design created a 2x2 array of patch antennas (4 antennas arranged in a square).  The antenna array is phased together to create a more directional beam, which helps overcome the higher attenuation.  I also designed radio frequency (RF) phase shifters using a switched-transmission line approach which will create steerability of the antenna beam.  This antenna steerability helps create a highly adaptable communication link. Whenever an obstruction (ex: a person) blocks the main signal path between a transmitter and receiver, the antenna can be electronically steered to reflect the wireless signal off random objects in the environment to complete the link.  These phased antenna arrays aren't used today in conventional wireless such as cell phones/Wi-Fi, but the next generation of wireless devices will use multiple antennas and phased arrays to complete links. My circuit also contained an RF-to-DC diode detector to help measure the strength of my antennas without the use of interfering RF probes.  I intend to write an IEEE journal article that explains and summarizes my entire design. Stay Tuned!

This past summer I was privileged with a summer internship at ETS-Lindgren, the leader in wireless solutions, antenna calibration and testing, RF/acoustic anechoic chambers, EMC, electromagnetic field probes, and many other things. ETS-Lindgren is a solid company headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas, USA (just outside Austin) with several global offices and provides excellent, high-quality products, services, and solutions to many tech companies worldwide. This was an amazing learning experience for me and I'm very grateful to their staff of engineers for allowing me this oppurtunity. I was able to learn a lot on RF chamber design and antenna testing for next generation wireless devices, and was able to contribute to their measurement and testing efforts. Many thanks, ETS-Lindgren!!

At the end of the Spring semester, I was recently honored at a EOE award ceremony. For the past year, I have volunteered and helped a UT student organization called Pi Sigma Pi. It is a minority academic engineering society founded by Dr. Phil Schmidt and this past year I helped with providing tutoring hours to students who needed a little extra help in EE classes as well as participating in their wonderful volunteer activities for the UT and Austin community. It's been a pleasure getting to know all the amazing, wonderful, and talented members and officers of Pi Sigma Pi, and I am very honored to be recognized as the 2009-2010 Phil Schmidt Member of the Year.  Thank you everyone!!

It's been a very busy semester. Since October, I've been engaged in projects, classes, research, and conferences which have all taken their fair share of my time.  I very much look forward to some down time this winter break, but also continuing on in my PhD work.  I attended the IEEE Global Communications (Globecom) conference this early December in Honolulu, Hawaii.  I presented two papers (one lecture style and one poster style) at this conference and it seemed to be well received. The papers can be downloaded via IEEE Xplore for those interested. One paper was part of the Wireless Communications Syposium (WCS) and the other paper was part of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz workshop (WS3). I didn't have much time for leisure unfortunately, but Hawaii is a beautiful place and I'd like to visit it again at some point in the future. One local informed me that 60 degress is probably the coldest weather in Hawaii during the year.  Sounds like my kind of home. :)

On the local front, I finished an RF circuits course and an advanced electromagnetics course as well.  The project in RF was designing an low noise amplifer for 2.1 GHz with some realistic models for bond wires and supply voltages/power. It was an interesting project and taught me a bit about the tradeoffs circuit designers face.  I look foward to taking an antennas course next semester and completing a PhD qualification exam.  I'm starting to transition from the classwork phase into the full-time research phase with copious measurements and writing. Hopefully, my hand won't cramp up!

Happy holidays everyone. Safe travels!
Mahalo,
-Felix

I returned back from my trip to Bologna, Italy in which I took part in the 2009 Marconi Prize events and ceremony. This year was the 100-year anniversary of Guglielmo Marconi winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for his contributions towards wireless/radio. Bologna is a beautiful place and the Marconi Foundation who organized the events and the ceremony did an excellent job.  I thank them very much for all their hard work and hosting me. It was truly a life-changing experience for me.  I delivered a short 25-minute presentation about my research at the Young Scholar's Workshop and my presentation seemed to be well-received. I also listened to the previous Marconi fellows discuss their fields of interest and their contributions to the state-of-technology and was very impressed with all the talent in the room that day.  Truly awe-inspiring. I am motivated more than ever to follow in the shoes of these giants and contribute as well towards society and technology.

Pictures soon to come!
-Felix

Here is a picture of the die that I fabricated.  It contains UT's first 60GHz on-chip antennas and an array of test structures that will help to create accurate simulations for future chip fabrication.  This chip is 2.5mm per side.

This past summer on June 15th, 2009 I submitted a layout design for an integrated circuit as part of a collaborative 6-project tapeout here at UT.  I am happy to report that the long hours and sleepless nights that created that submission have proven fruitful as we just received the chip yesterday!  This chip contains UT's first ever 60 GHz on-chip antennas and a plethora of other information and research waiting to be discovered and published for the entire UT team.  It is such a fulfilling feeling to finally see your research becoming a reality. :)   I will post some pictures of the chips soon.

We'll be setting new records in no time!