Events

Friday, February 7, 2020 Zoya Popovic, Distinguished Professor and Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado, will be presenting “Medical Applications of Microwaves”. Day & Time: Friday, February 7, 2020 3:00 p.m. ‐ 4:00 p.m. Speakers: Zoya Popovic Distinguished Professor Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair of Electrical Engineering, University of Colorado Organizers: IEEE Toronto Electromagnetics & Radiation Chapter Location: Bahen Centre for Information Technology – Room 2135 40 St George street Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 2E4 Register: https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/219067 Contact: Prof. Costas Sarris Abstract: This talk will first present a brief overview of the activities in the microwave group at the University of Colorado, Boulder, following a discussion on two topics that use microwave techniques for medical applications: (1) design of exciters and bore for human-sized 10.5-T MRI machines; and (2) a study of near-field radiometry for internal temperature measurements of the human body. The focus of the first topic is design of cavity and probes for improving uniformity of the circularly-polarized B-field inside phantoms for high-field travelling-wave MRI imagers. The phenomenology of high-field imaging and its resulting challenges will be highlighted, followed by simulation and experimental data using a research Siemens instrument. Although MRI can be used for measuring internal body temperature, it is expensive, large and slow. Radiometry is shown to be a feasible method for implementing a portable or even wearable microwave thermometer. One of the possible frequencies of operation is the 1.4 GHz quiet band, which is appropriate for centimeter penetration into tissues with minimized radio-frequency interference (RFI). The total blackbody power from a tissue stack is received by a probe placed on the skin, designed to receive a high percentage of the total power from a buried tissue layer. Temperature retrieval for sub-surface tissue layers is performed using near-field weighting functions, obtained by full-wave simulations with known tissue complex electrical parameters. Measurements are presented using a calibrated Dicke radiometer at 1.4GHz for various phantom tissues. It is shown that temperature can be tracked within a fraction of a degree for a phantom muscle tissue layer under phantom fat and skin layers. Biography: Zoya Popovic is a Distinguished Professor and the Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado. She obtained her Dipl.Ing. degree at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and her Ph.D. at Caltech. In 2001/03 and 2014, she was a Visiting Professor with the Technical University of Munich, Germany and ISAE in Toulouse, France, respectively. She was a Chair of Excellence at Carlos III University in Madrid in 2018-19. She has graduated 60 PhDs and currently advises 14 doctoral students in various areas of microwave engineering. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of two IEEE MTT Microwave Prizes for best journal papers, the White House NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow award, the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal, the ASEE/HP Terman Medal and the German Humboldt Research Award. She was named IEEE MTT Distinguished Educator in 2013 and the University of Colorado Distinguished Research Lecturer in 2015. She has a husband physicist and three daughters who can all solder.

Thursday March 5th, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. Dr. Markus Gardill, IEEE Distinguished Microwave Lecturer, will be presenting an IEEE Distinguished Lecture “Automotive Radar – A Signal Processing Perspective on Current Technology and Future Systems”. Day & Time: Thursday March 5th, 2020 4:00 p.m. ‐ 5:00 p.m. Speaker: Dr. Markus Gardill IEEE Distinguished Microwave Lecturer Organizers: IEEE Toronto Electromagnetics & Radiation Chapter Location: Bahen Centre, Room BA 1180 University of Toronto – St. George Campus 40 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: George V. Eleftheriades, FRSC, FIEEE Abstract: Radar systems are a key technology of modern vehicle safety & comfort systems. Without doubt it will only be the symbiosis of Radar, Lidar and camera-based sensor systems which can enable advanced autonomous driving functions soon. Several next generation car models are such announced to have up to 10 radar sensors per vehicle, allowing for the generation of a radar-based 360° surround view necessary for advanced driver assistance as well as semi-autonomous operation. Hence the demand from the automotive industry for high-precision, multi-functional radar systems is higher than ever before, and the increased requirements on functionality and sensor capabilities lead to research and development activities in the field of automotive radar systems in both industry and academic worlds. Current automotive radar technology is almost exclusively based on the principle of frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar, which has been well known for several decades. However, together with an increase of hardware capabilities such as higher carrier frequencies, modulation bandwidths and ramp slopes, as well as a scaling up of simultaneously utilized transmit and receive channels with independent modulation features, new degrees of freedom have been added to traditional FMCW radar system design and signal processing. The anticipated presentation will accordingly introduce the topic with a review on the fundamentals of radar and FMCW radar. After introducing the system architecture of traditional and modern automotive FMCW radar sensors, with e.g. insights into the concepts of distributed or centralized processing and sensor data fusion, the presentation will dive into the details of fast-chirp FMCW processing – the modulation mode which is used by the vast majority of current automotive FMCW radar systems. Starting with the fundamentals of target range and velocity estimation based on the radar data matrix, the spatial dimension available using modern single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems will be introduced and radar processing based on the radar data cube is discussed. Of interest is the topic of angular resolution – one of the key drawbacks which e.g. render Lidar systems superior to radar in some situations. Consequently, traditional and modern methods for direction of arrival estimation in FMCW radar systems are presented, starting from traditional monopulse-like algorithms to modern frameworks for superresolution DoA estimation. The presentation will then introduce the great challenge of FMCW radar system interference. While FMCW radar interference is a challenge which can be handled using adaptive signal processing in today’s systems, it will become a severe problem with the increasing number of radar-sensors equipped vehicles in dense traffic situations in the near future and a solution to the expected increase in interference is still an open question. It is this problem of interference, together with some added functionality, which motivated the proposal of alternative radar waveforms such as pseudo-random or orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) radar for automotive radar systems. Although not yet of great interest from an industrial perspective, the fundamentals and capabilities of both technologies will be introduced in the remainder of the anticipated presentation. Biography: Markus Gardill (S’11-M’15) was born in Bamberg, Germany in 1985. He received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degree in systems of information and multimedia technology/electrical engineering from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 2010 and 2015, respectively. In 2010, he joined the Institute for Electronics Engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg as a research assistant and teaching fellow. From 2014 to 2015 he was head of the team Radio Communication Technology. In late 2015 he joined the Robert Bosch GmbH as an R&D engineer for optical and imaging metrology systems and leading the cluster of non-destructive testing for the international production network. In 2016 he joined the automotive radar business segment of InnoSenT GmbH, where he is currently head of the group radar signal processing & tracking. His main research interest include radar and communication systems, antenna (array) design, and signal processing algorithms. His particular interest is spatio-temporal processing such as e.g. beamforming and direction-of-arrival estimation with a focus on combining the worlds of signal processing and microwave/electromagnetics. Dr. Gardill is an IEEE Young Professional. He is member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (IEEE MTT-S) and currently serves as co-chair of the IEEE MTT-S Technical Committee Digital Signal Processing (MTT-9). He regularly acts as reviewer and TPRC member for several journals and conferences, will act as associate editor of the Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques beginning with 2020 and serves as Distinguished Microwave Lecturer (DML) for the DML term 2018-2020 with a presentation focussing automotive radar systems.