ECE PhD student wins WAMICON best student paper award
Zach Vander Missen, phD student in Purdue’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has won 1st place in the student paper competition at the 2020/2021 IEEE WAMICON conference. The paper, entitled "Plasma Switch-Based Technology for High-Speed and High-Power Impedance Tuning," was a collaboration with Dimitrios Peroulis, Michael and Katherine Birck Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Reilly Professor of ECE, former Purdue ECE Prof. Abbas Semnani, now assistant professor of EECS at The University of Toledo, and Sergey Macheret, professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
"We designed a version of a circuit called an impedance tuner using an emerging plasma technology to enable high-power, high-speed systems,” says Vander Missen. “The plasma technology enables us to combine advantages of multiple other technologies showing order-of -magnitude improvement in a proof-of-concept prototype. This new technology has applications in high-power wireless communication systems."
Student papers were evaluated for originality, significance of the work, technical soundness, and interest to a wide audience.
The 21st annual IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference, WAMICON 2020/2021, was held virtually on April 28-29, 2021. The conference addressed up-to-date multidisciplinary research needs and interdisciplinary aspects of wireless and RF technology. The central theme of WAMICON 2020/2021 was "Wireless Devices and Systems Making Mad Connections from Space to the 5G IoE.”