Seongmin Cho, a doctoral student in POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering advised by Professor Ho-Jin Song, received Honorable Mention in the Student Paper Competition at the IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting (APS/URSI 2020) for “Ultra-low Power Beamforming Wideband OFDM Signal with Active GRIN Lens at 19 GHz.”

The paper proposes an active-lens-based beamforming system as an alternative addressing the power consumption obstacle in implementing beamforming, a key millimeter-wave 5G technology. It experimentally demonstrates ultralow-power beamforming at sub-mW levels.

The authors propose control wiring and active unit cells that enable two-dimensional beamforming while dramatically reducing wiring complexity from O(N²) to O(2N). Using a lens composed of these cells, they demonstrated ±40° steering of 5G-NR signals while consuming approximately one two-thousandth or less of the power required by conventional RFIC technology. Its low complexity and ultralow-power operation were recognized with Honorable Mention.

APS/URSI is the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society's largest international conference worldwide and is being held this year in Montreal, Canada. A total of 203 papers were submitted to the 2020 Student Paper Competition, among which this paper earned Honorable Mention.