Science Spin September 2008 : Sponsored Content - NUI Maynooth

Getting radio to 'go green'

Ronan Farrell is a lecturer in the Department of Electronic Engineering NUIM and is the Director of the Institute for Microelectronics and Wireless Systems at NUIM. Ronan has always been interested in engineering: the art of solving problems and making things.

Computers and electronics always held a fascination for Ronan, opening and examining computers and devices and seeing how they worked, though he admits he was not always able to put things back together again. This interest led Ronan to undertake a degree in Electronic Engineering at UCD in 1989. While at UCD, Ronan won a scholarship with ICI, the chemicals company, and spent his summers working on the chemical factories and oil refineries in England. His role there was to develop and maintain the control systems that ensured the quality of the product being made but also to ensure that it was done safely and without harm to the environment.

Upon graduation in 1993, he took a job with ICI and worked in Louisiana and England. In 1995, Ronan returned to UCD to study for a PhD with Dr Orla Feely in the nonlinear dynamics of sigma-delta modulators, a key component in many of our high performance electronics today such as in CD players. Graduating in 1998, Ronan joined Parthus Technologies, an Irish company that specialised in analog and digital silicon chip design for wireless applications.

Having previously worked in factories that were over a mile wide and using megawatts of power, he now was working with circuits that used microwatts and were smaller than the width of a human hair. To Ronan, microelectronics are an absolutely amazing achievement of human ingenuity, a modern chip has the complexity of a massive city but compressed to the size of the tip of your finger, and for it to work, every bit must work perfectly. As chips get smaller, the challenge in designing these systems gets ever harder and it remains astonishing that we can actually construct ever smaller devices.

Wireless

In 2000, Ronan joined the newly formed Department of Electronic Engineering at NUIM and focussed his research on wireless systems and the enabling technologies. While at Parthus, Ronan had become interested in the use of electronics in wireless communications and the impact of the Moore's Law on wireless systems. Modern wireless devices are the combination of electronics and radios and have become a fundamental part of our modern society. It would be hard to imagine the world without television, mobile phones, WiFi or even the ubiquitous baby monitors. Some of the most fashionable products in the market, for example the Apple iPhone, demonstrate the impact a good design may have.

Though many people assume that mobile phones work and nothing more needs to be done, wireless technologies are one of the fastest changing technologies. We are now seeing wireless devices are being developed so that cars can communicate with each other and the road itself to avoid collisions; wireless devices are being implanted in the body to monitor pacemakers that can automatically call for help in case of emergencies.

All this requires continued improvement in the design of these systems. Ronan's particular interest is in the area are of software-defined radios where through the use of software we can morph a wireless device from being a 2G phone to a WiFi device to any other wireless system. This will allow users to use a WiFi hotspot in a café to download a movie while chatting on a mobile phone network to friends.

Bottlenecks

This concept was first proposed nearly twenty years ago and much progress has been made but these wireless devices remain very difficult to build. Ronan's research is focussed on the key remaining bottlenecks, the hardware or electronics that must be flexible enough to support the existing flexible software programmes. As part of this research, they have developed, in partnership with TCD, a fully adaptable wireless system. This is one of only a few such systems in the world and has led to new research projects in the area of next generation TETRA radio systems as well as WiMAX and 4G mobile telephony.

Green radio

In addition to his work on reconfigurable wireless systems, Ronan is also very interested in green radio - radios that consume substantially less power. With billions of mobile phones, the energy consumed in those phones, and the supporting networks, is very large, some estimates put it over 50 GWh per year in Ireland (or 22,000 tons of CO2). Ronan and his team have been looking at technologies that could minimise the amount of energy required to achieve the same performance.

This problem needs to be approached from two directions: the technology used; and the way wireless systems operate in the presence of other wireless systems. One of the most exciting avenues is the area of power amplifiers, critical devices in all radio systems as they take our radio signal and amplify it for transmission from our antennas. Every wireless device needs one and they consume the most power.

Ronan is working in an international collaboration to develop amplifiers that are three times more efficient than anything currently available and with major companies such as Bell Labs and Alcatel Lucent. As a result of this research, Ronan has filed for two patents but there are many research challenges still to be addressed.

NUIM

Since joining NUI Maynooth, Ronan has been successful in securing a number of research grants from SFI and Enterprise Ireland, totalling approximately €6.3 million. As a result of the success of Ronan's research, the Institute of Microelectronics and Wireless Systems was formed with Ronan as the founding Director, a role which he retains today.

Given Ronan's background, his research, and that of the Institute, is focussed on applied research, research that addresses the issues faced by local and national companies, and that can provide them with opportunities for new developments. Ronan strongly believes that there can be an enriching collaboration between university and industry, exemplified by the success of Silicon Valley in California.

An example is the recent formation of a new company, SocoWave, to exploit a patented invention from Ronan's research and this company has recently hired several experienced engineers. For Ronan, electronic engineering and wireless systems offers a wide range of exciting opportunities for future research and for any student considering physics ore engineering as a career.