ECE Ph.D. students Ajibayo Adeyeye, Aline Eid, and Yepu Cui, and Jimmy Hester, a recent ECE Ph.D. graduate, won the first place award in the category of Backscatter Radio Design. They are members of the ATHENA Lab and are advised by Manos Tentzeris, who holds the Ken Byers Professorship in Flexible Electronics. 

The team was tasked with the design, fabrication, and test of a backscatter modulator which is a fundamental component of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transponders. The design was to be optimized to minimize power consumption and maximize its sensitivity while also minimizing weight and volumetric dimensions. The resulting design was an ultra-low power, highly sensitive, and surface agnostic modulator which can function as the front-end for low power sensing applications in the Internet of Things, smart agriculture, smart cities, and intelligent logistics.

Photo cutline: The ATHENA team is pictured with Dominique Schreurs (center), president of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. The ATHENA team is made up of Jimmy Hester (far left), Aline Eid (2^nd from left), Ajibayo Adeyeye (2^nd from right), and Yepu Cui (far right).