Senior Electrical Engineering student Christopher Greg Brinton recently presented at the 2011 IEEE Radio and Wireless Week (RWW). The conference was held in Glendale, Arizona. Each year, the purpose of RWW is to bring together engineering authors conducting original research in their areas of interest. Specifically, there were a set of diverse areas of electrical (and biomedical) engineering represented in five conferences: Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS), Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF), RF/Microwave Power Amplifiers (PAWR), Biomedical Wireless Technologies Networks & Sensing Systems (BioWireless), and Wireless Sensors and Sensor Networks (WiSNet).
Chris spoke at the Power Amplifiers for Wireless and Radio Applications (PAWR) which was a subset of the conference. He presented the results of some research he did with Dr. Katz at Linearizer Technology (LTI) on Reverse Inter-modulation Distortion (Reverse IMD) in power amplifiers, which occurs as a result of unwanted signals entering the output port of an amplifier. This problem occurs when multiple transmitters operate in close proximity to one another (for instance at a broadcasting station).
They developed two techniques in particular, termed isolation and phasing, for mitigating this phenomenon, and also attempted to classify performance (i.e. how much distortion is seen) based upon the type of amplifier under test. Since his previous presentation on this issue at the IEEE Symposium in October 2009, they have developed a theoretical model on why a certain type of amplifier behaves better than the others, and published a paper used in the digest of the conference.
Chris later said “This presentation was a great experience for me. It gave me the opportunity to speak in front of a large, passionate audience. Specifically, these were pioneers, experts, and authors in the field of power amplifiers for wireless applications. As the only undergraduate presenter at the conference, I was exposed to state of the art research in this field, and was able to network with PhD students and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Illinois, and various corporations, both US and international. I would like to thank Dr. Katz and the School of Engineering for this opportunity.”
Currently, Chris is doing research in Princeton’s EDGE Lab under the advisement of Dr. Mung Chiang and Dr. Sangtae Ha. Their lab studies state of the art networking techniques, both wireless and wire-line. At the moment, he is integrating a 10 Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Network (10G EPON) into their lab, bringing to them what he has learned about fiber networks between his summer 2010 internship at AT&T and his senior project. They hope to write and test various dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithms on this network, to determine optimum ways of assigning time slots to different users depending on how ‘busy’ the network is currently and what the users are requesting.
Chris also said “Next year I see myself in graduate school, pursuing my PhD either in RF design or communication systems. I have applied to many schools, but currently my top choices are Princeton, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania. After that, I would really like to work in research for a corporation such as AT&T, and also teach at a college or university as an adjunct.”