Student Ahmed Kord Receives First Place in Student Poster Competition for Cloaking and Circulator Research

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Published:
July 11, 2017

WNCG student Ahmed Kord won first place in the student poster competition at the Texas Symposium on Wireless and Microwave Circuits and Systems 2017 in Waco, Texas. He received the award for his poster entitled “Active Electromagnetic Devices for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems.” The first place winner also receives $500.  

“This recognition and appreciation of my work motivates me to work even harder,” Kord states. “I want to have an actual and useful imprint on the microwave field during my PhD, and receiving this award means I am one step closer to my goal.”

Kord’s research poster covered his work on two newly-proposed microwave devices. The first device is a passive, magnet-less circulator based on linear periodically time-variant circuits, while the second is a wideband microwave cloak that uses an array of dipole antennas loaded with stable, non-foster admittances.

“The circulator can enable full-duplex communication, which was presumed impossible for a long time,” Kord states. “Our latest results already meet all the requirements for practical systems and exceed by orders of magnitude the performance for any similar device proposed in the last few decades.”

Kord’s work is receiving an increasing amount of interest from funding agencies and companies such as Qualcomm, where Kord received the prestigious Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in partnership with Columbia University for a related proposal.

The second device, the active cloak, is still under development.

“Unlike previous proposals,” Kord states. “The active cloak device can actually work in practical scenarios and can achieve electromagnetic invisibility over a wide bandwidth.”

Kord and his research collaborators have already developed a detailed theory for this cloak, tested it with simulations and are currently preparing for further experiments on it in the near future. At WNCG, Kord is advised by Prof. Andrea Alù.