Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

The smart home system based on wireless sensor networks is a combination of technologies and services that improve the life in the areas of safety, comfort and technical management. In the smart home scenario, sensors, RFID, local positioning system and decisional algorithms are combined to achieve various functionalities in complete smart and autonomous system. The smart home goes beyond the stereotype of a homeowner who can check his house on a smartphone and verify the status of interior devices such as security alarm or heating system. In addition, wearable and no-contact healthcare devices can monitor resident blood pressure, heart rate and other metrics (posture, ECG, breathing) and transmit data to the resident smartphone as part of a medical tele-monitoring system. These indoor systems should work in millimeter-wave range to be compatible with future applications of millimeter-wave technology in wireless communications such as 5G platforms, especially information sharing of sensor networks and functional interplay among wireless functionalities.
System working in millimeter-wave range, should deal with some constraints in indoor environment like dynamic range, propagation blockage and noise. Reconfigurability in circuits and systems gives an additional tool to meet the stringent frequency and power requirements, even in the changing of operating environment inherent in these systems. In addition, tunable circuit responses can be made to compensate for the deleterious effects of aging and temperature changes in sensitive RF circuits.
At millimeter-wave band and beyond, the actual active components which use TEM-mode waveguide are troubled by transmission loss, fabrication tolerance and other problems. Non-TEM modes such as SIW (substrate integrated waveguide) guide offers much better solutions. Therefore, the concept of “true” active waveguide techniques based on “nonlinear” media similar to the solid-state semiconductor devices should be developed. The “active” waveguide should present “distributed” features with wave interactions instead of voltage and current characterized “lumped” such as diodes and transistors. To do so, innovative thick- and think-films and substrate such as BST, ferroelectric and liquid crystal materials, will be integrated inside or as layer in SIW line.
The strategic goal of this proposal is to develop reconfigurable circuits and waveguides to be integrated in millimeter wave systems for different indoor applications. Tunable waveguides developed in this project will be used to design distributed phase shifters based on BST that allow different modulations and smart antenna operations. The different developed components and waveguides will be integrated in the same platform to estimate the performances enhancement. Of course, such final platform will provide “smart” and “performance demanding” actions.