November 26, 2013
The IEEE COMCAS (Conference On Microwaves, Communications, Antennas, and Electronic Systems) provides a multidisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas, research results, and industry experience in the areas of microwaves, communications, antennas, solid state circuits, electromagnetic compatibility, electron devices, radar, and electronic systems engineering. The conference also includes a technical program, industry exhibits, and invited talks by international experts in these areas.
Keynote speakers at the 2013 IEEE COMCAS were Dr. Adam Drobot, Past President of Advanced Technology Solutions and CTO of Telcordia Technologies, Inc. and Shmuel (Mooly) Eden, Senior VP of Intel Corporation and President of Intel Israel. Other distinguished speakers included Moshe Kam (2011 IEEE President), Professor Madhu S. Gupta (President of IEEE MTT Society), and Dr. Franz Dielacher (Director of Infineon Technologies), among others.
In addition, this year’s technical exhibition included over 90 displays, which offered attendees from the industry, academia, and the government a unique opportunity to network with relevant companies, vendors, and technologies from Israel and abroad.
The conference featured 140 professional lectures divided into five parallel sessions in the morning and afternoon which covered the topics of RFICs; mm-Wave systems; Microwave Imaging, Detection, and Tomography; Medical Technologies; SAR Hyperspectral Data Analysis; Metamaterials; Automative radar and mm-wave Integration in Silicon, among others.
Not surprisingly, the field of mm-wave (MMW) threat detection – a major focus of the CMIP’s research efforts – was a popular topic at the conference. I was happy to see several groups presented their efforts towards building a real-time MMW detector. Some key obstacles researchers are actively trying to overcome when designing real-time, high-resolution MMW detectors include the hardware cost, antenna size, and measurement speeds associated with such devices, and it was satisfying to see how far along the CMIP has come towards addressing these issues with the Meta-Imager, our proposed solution.
My 15-minute talk, titled “Meta-Material Apertures for Computational Imaging”, summarized our Meta-Imager's abilities to image and reconstruct scenes using compressive sensing. I highlighted our early achievements with the 1D microstrip aperture we discussed in Science as well as recent experiments utilizing our newer, larger 2D panels.
Participants also had opportunities to meet-and-greet one another outside the framework of the conference’s technical presentations. During the evening following the second day of the conference I had the pleasure of joining other participating students as well as the conference’s VIPs on a tour of Jerusalem. We explored recent archeological digs near the Western Wall, and ended the tour with a delicious dinner at Jerusalem’s Eucalyptus restaurant, which offers foods indigenous to the land of Israel.