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!