RF Alliance Newsletter, Summer 2010
In This Issue.. Letter from the Director STEM Coordinator Poster Competition Winners Upcoming Conferences Company Profiles
RF Reflections from the director, Larry McPike
TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION - the name of the game. The vision of the RF Alliance (RFA) is to "Be the Catalyst That Enables Transition of Innovative Advanced RF Technologies to Military and Commercial Applications". YES, we have a technology transition. One of the RFA 2009 projects was the Optical RF-to-Digital Converters. This was a partnership between Polyphase Microwave, a small business in Bloomington, Indiana and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. As a result of this project, Polyphase Microwave designed and developed two prototype Quadrature Modulators. Based on the success of the prototypes, seven new quadrature modulator designs have been released to production. Lockheed Martin is now acquiring these quadrature modulators to upgrade their 8 GHz OQPSK satellite uplinks. Congratulations to Polyphase Microwave and its Owner/President, Roy Hoover. Be looking for more technology transitions that will be coming soon. Or better still, partner with the RFA to get your RF technology innovations transitioned.
The US Department of Education reports that only 23 % of college freshman declare a STEM major. That percentage represents only 15% of the total college age population of 3.6 million. Only 40 % of college freshman that elect STEM majors receive a STEM degree within 6 years. That comes out to about 6% of the total 3.6 million college age population. The United States faces a critical shortage of scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians.
The RF Alliance has taken significant steps to facilitate K-12 student migration to STEM majors and Engineering undergraduates to RF Engineering graduate studies. We are seeking funding on two STEM initiatives that will make a difference: The RF Alliance Fellowship Program (RFA Fellowship Program) and the Start Up, Amp Up, Keep Up (StAK) Grant.
The RFA Fellowship Program will create resources for the most promising domestic students to continue undergraduate and graduate work in a discipline related to RF and wireless technologies. The program includes partial undergraduate and full graduate scholarships, industry partnerships on student projects and industry internships for students. All RF Alliance partners will benefit from the stronger professional community and opportunities created by the fellowship. A grant application has been submitted to the Lilly Endowment to fund the RFA Fellowship Program.
The StAK Grant will provide resources for Indiana Public School Corporations, particularly rural schools, to become fully engaged in the Project Lead the Way (PLTW) engineering curriculum. A major component of the proposal is paid summer internships for PLTW teachers with RF Alliance members and other local engineering industry partners. A $20M grant proposal has been submitted to the USDoE under the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund.
There are many more RFA STEM projects coming down the road. The RF Alliance is actively engaged in addressing the professional shortage our nation faces. I look forward to updating RFA members on our STEM Education ventures and collaborations.
Jay Inman
STEM Coordinator
jay.inman@rfalliance.orgThe student poster competition winners at the most recent RF Alliance conference, Enabling Multi-Antenna & Broadband RF Systems at Purdue University, are listed below. Andrew Christianson will also be recognized at GOMAC 2011 with his poster on Passive Intermodulation Mitigation Techniques. Congratulations to all our poster winners.
1st Place:
Microwave Reconfigurable Evanescent-Mode Cavity Filters
Poster Authors: Hjalti H. Sigmarsson, Eric J. Naglich, Juseop Lee, Dimitrios Peroulis, William Chappell
Purdue University
2nd Place:
Passive Intermodulation Mitigation Techniques
Poster Authors: Andrew Christianson, Justin Henrie, and William Chappell
Purdue University
3rd Place:
Implementation and Experimental Results of Superposition Coding on Software Radio
Poster Authors: R. K. Ganti, Z. Gong, M. Haenggi, C. Lee, S. Srinivasa, D. Tisza, S. Vanka and P. Vizi
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame
Honorable Mention:
Portable and Low-Cost Radar System for Opportunistic Sensing Through Walls
Poster Authors: Kenneth Browne, Robert Burkholder, John Volakis
The Ohio State University
Honorable Mention:
A Planar Parasitic Array Antenna for Tunable Radiation Pattern
Poster Authors: Seongheon Jeong, Dohyuk Ha, William Chappell
Purdue UniversityThe RF Alliance will be featuring different companies to be profiled in our upcoming newsletters. If your company is interested in being featured please contact Jacque.Norris@rfalliance.org.
