Electromagnetics & high-frequency circuit design
High-speed electronic IC design and design of electromagnetics for integrated systems, are essential for the ever increasing speeds of wireless and optical interfaces.
The design cluster is specialized in the research and development of high-speed and high-frequency electronic circuits, subsystems and system demonstrators on chip and board level. This expertise is applied to the physical layer of several advanced optical, wired, wireless and instrumentation applications, such as:
- Fiber-optic transceivers beyond 40Gbps for datacenter, access, metro, radio-over-fiber and transport networks
- Short-reach copper 50Gbps+ interconnects for chip-to-chip, chip-to-module, backplane and cable backplane links
- Wireless communications for 5G and the internet of things
- Instrumentation and measurement electronics for monitoring and controlling the physical layer of communications networks and for medical applications
The Electromagnetic lab analyzes electromagnetic systems using electromagnetic simulation techniques and state-of-the-art measurement equipment for
- the analysis of electromagnetic waveguides,
- evaluation of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) problems,
- antenna design for smart antenna systems for wireless networks
- electromagnetic propagation
Examples
A 100Gbps transceiver chipset for serial copper communication has been developed in the lab and is now subject of the BiFast incubation project of UGent.
In collaboration with Melexis NV a glowplug module IC (Continental) was tested. A Bulk Current Injection (BCI) set up revealed non-compliance issues of the module. This resulted in a redesign of the module.