The recent joint annual meetings in Boston of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits conference (RFIC 2009) and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) had researchers and students from Calit2 and UC San Diego out in force -- 17 UCSDers were on hand (five of them at left). UC San Diego was also the only university showing off hardware at their exhibit booth, staffed by a team led by Calit2's Javier Rodriguez Molina. They demonstrated technologies including Calit2's Gizmo, CalMesh, CalRadio and much more.

Meanwhile, on the conference side, UCSD graduate students came home with bronze and silver medals for research papers presented at the two meetings. As we reported in our roundup before the week ended, ECE grad student Jason May earned the third-best paper award at RFIC 2009 for his paper with professor Gabriel Rebeiz. It's about a new RFIC that could lead to significantly less expensive imaging systems for identifying concealed weapons. The high-performance W-band chip for passive, millimeter-wave imaging uses silicon germanium (SiGe), which only requires a commercial silicon semiconductor process, rather than a highly customized (read: expensive) manufacturing process.

The second part of "Microwave Week" was IMS 2009, and this time, it was a graduate student in the lab of ECE professor Peter Asbeck who took home the prize, this time for the second-place student paper of the symposium. Ph.D. candidate Sataporn Pornpromlikit -- whose nickname is Aui, pronounced way, and whose full name appears on multiple Internet sites featuring noteworthy real names! -- was the first author on the paper, titled "A 33dBm 1.9GHz Silicon-on-Insulator CMOS Stacked-FET Power Amplifier." The Thai researcher spends most of his time in Calit2 and tested his RFIC in the Calit2 power amplifier testbed. His co-authors included UCSD postdoc Calogero Presti, Antonino Scuderi of STmicroelectronics, recent UCSD Ph.D. JinHo Jeong who is now on the faculty at Korea's Kwangwoon University, and Peter Asbeck. Notes Calit2's Don Kimball: "It was a come-from-behind victory based on a paper that was previously rejected. The odds were stacked against them as it was a stacked MOSFET design fraught with risk."

A risk apparently worth running.... We'll update this post soon with photos....