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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211210T110000
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UID:5339-1639134000-1639137600@ece.northeastern.edu
SUMMARY:ECE PhD Proposal Review: Michele Pirro
DESCRIPTION:PhD Proposal Review: Scandium-doped Aluminum Nitride for new MEMS technologies \nMichele Pirro \nLocation: 432 ISEC \nZoom Link Meeting ID: 938 0086 0379 https://northeastern.zoom.us/u/abZS2SmtT1 \nAbstract: The increasing demand for data is pushing the MEMS industry to more performant and area-efficient systems to be used in IOT nodes as sensors and RF-components. In this market\, AlN plays a pivotal role thanks to the piezoelectric properties accompanied with good stability over power and temperature in miniaturized devices. In fact\, AlN is already present in different commercial MEM systems\, such as duplexers\, ultrasound generators\, energy harvesters and so on\, proving a mature mass-production process flow. The required more stringent specifications in terms of bandwidth\, losses and efficiency are pushing towards piezoelectric materials with higher coupling coefficient\, but still in a compatible post-CMOS process flow. Luckily\, recent works showed how it is possible to enhance the piezoelectric effect by doping AlN with Scandium\, allowing up to 400% increase in the d33 piezoelectric coefficient. The enhanced acoustic transduction along with the recent demonstration of ferroelectric switching and the post-IC compatibility\, is making Sc-doped AlN a new material with the potential not only to replace AlN\, but also to integrate different functionalities within the same component. Academy and industry all over the world are actively researching the actual potential of the material but there is still a lack of information on high-Sc concentration\, which would allow lower-voltage switching along with higher d33. This work has the main objective to show Sc-concentration > 28% and their piezo/ferroelectric response for a new class of microelectromechanical devices.\nThe proposal will discuss the advance in the process flow of high Sc- concentrations\, showing the impact of the deposition parameters on the material properties. Thin films with good crystallinity on IC-substrate and enhanced d33 are reported\, along with first attempts to resonator-devices. An in-depth ferroelectric characterization will show how coercive field and leakage current are the main limiting factors the material is facing to integrate its memory effect. For this purpose\, the work will present how tuning of Sc-concentration\, substrate-rf and bulk stress can ease these limiting factor\, opening to new acoustic devices with memory functionalities. The last part will focus on the co-integration of acoustic properties with ferroelectric switching for tunable filters and ultrasonic generators in post-IC compatible substrates.
URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu/event/ece-phd-proposal-review-michele-pirro/
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211210T134500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211210T144500
DTSTAMP:20260521T015729
CREATED:20211202T021501Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211202T021536Z
UID:5329-1639143900-1639147500@ece.northeastern.edu
SUMMARY:ECE PhD Proposal Review: Leonardo Bonati
DESCRIPTION:PhD Proposal Review: Softwarized Approaches for the Open RAN of NextG Cellular Networks \nLeonardo Bonati \nLocation: 532 ISEC \nAbstract: The 5th (5G) and 6th generations (6G) of cellular networks\, also known as NextG\, will bring unprecedented flexibility to the wireless cellular ecosystem. Because of its typically closed and rigid market\, the telco industry has incurred high costs and non-trivial obstacles in delivering those new services and functionalities to satisfy the requirements and the demand of NextG networks. To break this trend the industry is now moving towards open architectures based on softwarized approaches\, which will afford network operators flexible control and unprecedented adaptability to heterogeneous conditions\, including traffic and application requirements. Now\, by simply expressing a high-level intent\, operators will be able to instantiate bespoke services on-demand on a generic hardware infrastructure\, and to adapt such services to the current network conditions. Through disaggregation\, network elements will split their functionalities across multiple components—possibly provided by different vendors—interconnected through well-defined open interfaces. The separation of control functions from the hardware fabric\, and the introduction of standardized control interfaces\, will ultimately enable definition and use of softwarized control loops\, which will bring embedded intelligence and real-time analytics to effectively realizing the vision of autonomous and self-optimizing networks.\nThis dissertation work focuses on the design\, prototyping and experimental evaluation of softwarized approaches for the new open Radio Access Network (RAN) of NextG cellular networks. We analyze the architectural enablers\, challenges and requirements for a programmatic zero-touch control of the very many network elements and propose practical solutions for its realization. We prototype solutions by leveraging open-source software implementations of cellular protocol stacks and frameworks\, and heterogeneous virtualization technologies\, including the srsRAN and OpenAirInterface cellular implementations\, and the O-RAN framework. The contributions of this work include (i) the first demonstration of O-RAN data-driven control loops in a large-scale experimental testbed using open-source\, programmable RAN and RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) components through xApps of our design\, and (ii) CellOS\, a zero-touch cellular operating system that automatically generates and executes distributed control programs for simultaneous optimization of heterogeneous control objectives on multiple network slices starting from a high-level intent expressed by the operators. The effectiveness of our solutions in achieving superior control and performance of the RAN is demonstrated on state-of-the-art experimental facilities\, including software-defined radio-based laboratory setups and open access experimental wireless platforms\, such as Colosseum\, Arena\, and the POWDER-RENEW platform from the U.S. PAWR program.
URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu/event/ece-phd-proposal-review-leonardo-bonati/
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