Research team wins the ‘Research Collaboration’ Category.
u-blox (SIX:UBXN), a global provider of leading positioning and wireless communication technologies, together with the University of Bristol (UK) were announced as the winners of the Research Collaboration category at the TechWorks Awards 2018 – the highest accolade in the UK Deep Tech Industry, for their R&D project on Reconfigurable Wireless Transceivers for Global Connectivity.
Jim Connelly, Director, u-blox Cork said: “We are thrilled to have won this award and it is a remarkable achievement given the strength of the competition in this category. This has proven to be a very successful collaboration with the University of Bristol and will continue to be so. As u-blox’s Transceiver Centre of Excellence, u-blox Cork is highly focussed on sustained R&D activities in the areas of Cellular, Wi-Fi and IoT. Winning this award reinforces our vision of excellence whilst underlining the importance of collaboration in the research ecosystem.”
Speaking of the team’s achievements Mark Beach, Professor of Radio Systems Engineering in Bristol’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Manager of the EPSRC CDT in Communications and a member of the Communication Systems & Networks (CSN) Group, said: “This has been a truly unique collaboration and most rewarding to see a PhD through the CDT in Communications and subsequent R&D supported by an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award between u-blox and Bristol yield such a high calibre outcome. We will continue to develop this exciting technology with our partners.”
Consumer demand for mobile data continues to outstrip the capability of 4G networks; 5G needs to exploit new and advanced wireless communication technologies to provide the mobile networks of tomorrow. By bringing together u-blox’s commercial know-how and experience in wireless product design, and the University of Bristol’s expertise in the field of waveform cancellation, the multi-disciplinary team have developed a novel, tuneable, radio architecture for mobile devices. The innovative design facilitates global roaming on 4G and 5G, provides seamless spectrum access across diverse and fragmented frequency ranges, and is the first standards compliant and commercially viable circuit of its type.
The team from the Communication Systems & Networks Group at the University of Bristol (UK) and u-blox Engineering centres in Cambourne (Cambridgeshire, UK) and Cork (Ireland) have jointly addressed this global challenge through collaborative R&D since 2012. PhD sponsorship and mentoring of Leo Laughlin, and later that of Chinqing (Jack) Zhang, under the supervision of Professors Mark Beach and Kevin Morris, and industrial mentoring by John Haine, Kalim Khan and Micí McCullagh, has culminated with a highly novel Frequency Agile Frequency Division Duplexer solution. In addition to the 9 conference and 7 journal publications, including a recent paper in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, a standards compliant laboratory prototype has been designed, built and tested through this collaborative venture.
Leo Laughlin, Research Fellow in the Communication Systems and Networks Group, said: “We are absolutely delighted that our hard work on this project has been recognised with this award. The success of this project was only possible through the close working relationship of this academic/industrial team, which has allowed us to develop and apply novel radio technologies to target a highly specific commercial need.”
Technical information about the research can be found in the following paper:
Leo Laughlin, Chunqing Zhang, Mark A. Beach, Kevin A. Morris, John L. Haine, Muhammad Kalimuddin Khan and Michael McCullagh, “Tunable Frequency-Division Duplex RF Front End Using Electrical Balance and Active Cancellation” in IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 2018.
Other nominees in the category ‘Research Collaboration’ included ARM with the University of Southampton as well as City University.
