NSF awards grant to ECE ILLINOIS faculty to develop energy-efficient chip-scale sensors
8/30/2018
With the increasing demand for wireless communications and sensing, there has been an unprecedented RF spectrum shortage -- a recent Federal Communications Committee (FCC) auction sold bundles of spectrum around 1.8 GHz for more than $40 billion. Since access to the spectrum will continue to be an important foundation for America's economic growth and technological leadership, it is imperative to efficiently use the limited spectrum.
The team proposes to develop a new generation of energy-efficient and low-cost spectrum sensing systems by fusing recent innovations in RF acoustic-resonator-based devices, reconfigurable circuits, and sparse signal processing. If successful, this development will enable a transformative functionality -- energy-efficient sensing of densely occupied wide spectrum in real time -- that allows for substantial enhancement of spectrum efficiency.
The NSF grant is funded through the organization’s Spectrum Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, and Security (SpecEES) program which is coordinated by NSF’s Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) to identify bold new concepts to significantly improve the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization while addressing new challenges in energy efficiency and security.
Al-Hassanieh and Zhou are also affiliated with the CSL. Gong is an Intel Alumni Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering and also affiliated with MNTL.