Cheaper Circuits for Weapon Detection in EETimes

EETimes journalist R. Colin Johnson covered the Toward Cheaper Imaging Systems for Identifying Concealed Weapons on the Human Body research presented this week at RFIC2009.


"Terahertz SiGe imager sees through clothes"

Chip in low-cost silicon germanium process enables 'X-ray vision' using harmless millimeter waves

PORTLAND, Ore. — Silicon-germanium (SiGe) RF chips now in lab prototype form could one day be used in millimeter-wavelength W-band imaging devices sensitive enough to "see" through clothing to reveal concealed weapons.

EEs from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) presented their design at the IEEE RFIC Symposium in Boston on June 9. The chip operates in the terahertz range (1 THz = 1,000 GHz) to provide X-ray-like vision, but using safe, naturally occurring millimeter wavelengths. The designers said the chip could be produced using inexpensive silicon processing techniques. Read the full story here.

Honorary Ph.D. for the 'Da Vinci Detective'

On Monday, June 8, our own Maurizio Seracini, director of Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was in Canada to be honored at commencement ceremonies of McMaster University.

(Thanks to Calit2 Life for the content of this post).

They gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree, to add to his previous degrees in bioengineering (from UC San Diego, Class of '73) and electrical engineering (University of Padua). According to the Hamilton Spectator newspaper reporter covering the Calit2 scientist's address to the McMaster Convocation, Seracini "is a modern-day Renaissance man approaching problems in the same way Leonardo did five centuries ago."

Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged an interdisciplinary approach to university education. He encouraged students studying sciences to also explore the arts to become more rounded." The newspaper also picked up on Seracini's call in his speech for great works of art to be treated like patients. "You need to define when, how and if to restore it," the adjunct professor in UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering structural engineering department is quoted as saying. "Just like you would do in the medical field. You would not accept the idea of surgery without going through a full range of diagnostics." Officials from McMaster also indicated that they hope to bring Seracini back to the campus on the western end of Lake Ontario to give guest lectures.

Engineers Test Composite Landing Gear

For the first time, UC San Diego engineers have performed tests on landing gear components for the aerospace industry. Led by Hyonny Kim, an associate professor in structural engineering at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, the researchers performed six months of rigorous Federal Aviation Administration tests on the first-ever composite landing gear braces, which will be used for the new Boeing 787 aircraft.

The purpose of the full-scale tests, performed for Messier-Dowty, the world leader in landing gear design and manufacturing , was to prove the strength and capability of these major structural components. These components, made by Messier-Dowty using advanced composite materials (carbon fibers and epoxy), were subjected to loads approaching 1 million pounds using UC San Diego’s unique Caltrans Seismic Response Modification Device (SRMD) test facility. The SRMD’s testing table is 16 feet-long by 12 feet-wide, and can move horizontally and vertically, and rotate (i.e. six degrees of freedom), and shake at velocities of up to 70 inches per second.

Read the full story here, written by Andrea Siedsma.

UC San Diego at RFIC 2009

“This year, UC San Diego has 11 (out of 140) papers at the RFIC 2009 conference, which is much more than any other university,” said Larry Larson, Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. (See below for entire list of UC San Diego papers).

“Our success at this conference is a direct result of the investment that UC San Diego has made over many decades in the field of wireless communications. The RFIC field requires an interdisciplinary team, because it requires innovation in the areas of electronic devices, integrated circuit theory, electromagnetic theory and communications systems. The broad skills of the UCSD faculty have made this extraordinary level of research innovation possible,” said Larson.

The next highest school was National Taiwan University with 6. UC Berkeley had 4 and MIT had 2.

Read the UC San Diego press release on work toward a cheaper airport imager for detecting condealed weapons here:

A SAW-Less CDMA Receiver Front-End with Single-Ended LNA and Single-Balanced Mixer with 25% Duty-Cycle LO in 65nm CMOS
H. Khatri from UC San Diego, L. Liu, T. Chang, and P. S. Gudem from Qualcomm Inc; L. E. Larson from UC San Diego.

A DC-102GHz Broadband Amplifier in 0.12 μm SiGe BiCMOS
J. Kim and J. F. Buckwalter, UC San Diego

Low-Loss 0.13μm CMOS 50 - 70GHz SPDT and SP4T Switches
Y. A. Atesal, B. Cetinoneri, G. M. Rebeiz, UC San Diego

A Two-Channel Ku-Band BiCMOS Digital Beam-Forming Receiver for Polarization-Agile Phased-Array Applications
B. Cetinoneri, Y. A. Atesal, G. M. Rebeiz, UC San Diego

A 25 dBm High-Efficiency Digitally-Modulated SOI CMOS Power Amplifier for Multi-Standard RF Polar Transmitters
S. Pornpromlikit from UC San Diego, J. Jeong from Kwangwoon Univ, C. D. Presti from UC San Diego, A. Scuder from STMicroelectronics, and P. M. Asbeck from UC San Diego.

Fully Integrated Dual-Band Power Amplifiers with On-Chip Baluns in 65nm CMOS for an 802.11n MIMO WLAN SoC
A. Afsahi from UC San Diego and Broadcom Corp, A Behzad from Broadcom Corp, V. Magoon from Broadcom Corp, L. E. Larson from UC San Diego

Background Estimation of Power Amplifier Nonlinearities for OFDM Signals
P. V. Kolinko , L. E. Larson from UC San Diego.

High-Performance W-Band SiGe RFICs for Passive Millimeter-Wave Imaging
J. W. May, G. M. Rebeiz from UC San Diego

A 4-Channel 24-27GHz CMOS Differential Phased-Array Receiver
T. Yu, G. M. Rebeiz, from UC San Diego

A Dual-Band CMOS CDMA Transmitter without SAW and Driver Amplifier
M. Farazian from UC San Diego, B. Asuri from Qualcomm Inc, Y. Zhao from Qualcomm Inc, L. E. Larson from UC San Diego

Injection Locked Oscillator Arrays for Spectrμm Analysis
T.D. Gathman, J.F. Buckwalter from UC San Diego

Toward Cheaper Imaging Systems for Identifying Concealed Weapons on the Human Body

Electrical engineers from UC San Diego have created high-performance W-Band silicon-germanium (SiGe) radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for passive millimeter-wave imaging. This advance could lead to significantly less expensive imaging systems for identifying concealed weapons, for helping helicopters to land during dust storms, and for high frequency data communications. Electrical engineers from UC San Diego presented this circuit at the 2009 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium. This work was also selected as one of the best three student papers at RFIC 2009.

Draft PDF of the paper is available here:
http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/jsoe/Daniel/jason_RFIC09final.pdf

Jacobs School version of press release is here:
http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=856

Video is coming soon.

The new millimeter wave amplifier system works at the same frequency and follows the same underlying principles as some of the most advanced security imaging systems now in use in airports. The new UC San Diego circuit is unique in that it uses standard silicon semiconductor technology, while today’s security imaging systems working in the same millimeter frequency range often rely on expensive gallium arsenide or indium phosphide amplifiers. This advance is from the laboratories of Gabriel Rebeiz, a professor of electrical engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering and a world leader in millimeter-wave RFIC design, phased-arrays and Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).

The RFIC Conference is the premiere annual conference in the world for reporting recent research developments in Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFICs). These circuits are responsible for the communications links in all wireless devices. This year, UC San Diego has 11 (out of 140) papers at the conference, which is much more than any other university.

“Our circuit functions at the same frequencies as some of the most advanced millimeter wave imagers around. The big difference is that we are using a commercial silicon semiconductor process technology while other systems are typically customized and very expensive. The technologies that we use are very inexpensive and reliable, so we should be able to bring the costs of those sorts of systems down, perhaps even to handheld scanners some day,” said Jason May, an electrical engineering PhD student at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering and the first author on the RFIC 2009 paper.

The new circuit also includes an antenna that can be used to capture radiation in the millimeter wave frequency emitted from the human body and from objects under a person’s clothing. This radiation passes through clothing largely or completely unaffected.

Imagers operating at millimeter waves are particularly useful because they can resolve images down to a millimeter scale, fine enough detail to identify small objects and separate items on a person’s body.

“By the size of the signal we detect, we can tell the temperature of the signal we are looking at,” explained Gabriel Rebeiz, the electrical engineering professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering supervising the project. “An imager with our chip could resolve images down to a millimeter scale, enabling us to identify very small objects that are on someone’s body,” said Rebiez.

“A ceramic knife concealed against a person’s leg, for instance, might appear one or half of one degree cooler than the rest of their body. We could then tell that something is there and we could exactly determine its shape,” said May.
Using signal processing, these kinds of scanners can put together an image of a temperature map of a person’s body that includes any objects underneath the clothing.
Imagers, high speed communications systems, and other applications that operate at the millimeter wave frequency are poised to become increasingly prevalent and influential as the circuit technologies for integrating them with existing silicon technologies matures.

“Our success at this conference is a direct result of the investment that UC San Diego has made over many decades in the field of wireless communications. The RFIC field requires an interdisciplinary team, because it requires innovation in the areas of electronic devices, integrated circuit theory, electromagnetic theory and communications systems. The broad skills of the UCSD faculty have made this extraordinary level of research innovation possible," said Larry Larson, Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

###

“High-Performance W-Band SiGe RFICs for Passive Millimeter-Wave Imaging,” by Jason May and Gabriel Rebeiz, University of California, San Diego. Presented at 2009 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, June 7-9, 2009.

This work is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States of America.

Structural Engineers in SDNN

Eric Yates from SDNN, the San Diego News Network, wrote about UC San Diego's shake table out at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.

Also, check out an interesting story in Forbes about the changing media landscape in San Diego.

Space Pee in the Union Tribune

The UC San Diego undergrads who are studying fluid streams in zero gravity with the hope of making more comfortable and sanitary urine collection devices for space travel were profiled in the San Diego Union Tribune today.

Read Scott LaFee's story here.

This story in the Union Tribune links back to the video I produced about the Microgravity Project.