Current Research Areas:

1. Full DuplexWireless Communications.

Full duplex has emerged as a new communication paradigm shift and is anticipated to significantly increase information transmission capacity. Wireless networks have conventionally been built on half duplex radios due to the self-interference of the transmitted signal at the receiver. However, recent advances in communications technologies showed the feasibility of cancelling such self-interference so that transmission and reception can be performed simultaneously. Substantial research effort has focused on designing full duplex radios by combining RF and baseband interference cancellation, enabling bi-directional transmission between a single pair of nodes. Full duplex technology is thus anticipated to double wireless capacity without adding extra radios. Nevertheless, due to various practical limitations, full duplex hasn't been effectively used in most wireless systems. There are still a lot of challenging problems to be solved in order for the full duplex technology to be applied in practice. Also, in addition to wireless communications, full duplex can be used in other wireless systems such as active radar systems, resulting in revolutionary architecture innovation and significant performance improvement.

2. Massive Hybrid Antenna Array for mm-Wave Communications.

Wireless communications using millimetre wave (mm-wave) frequency bands have grown from niche market applications to potentially global applications in mobile broadband systems. With the dramatic increase in wireless mobile data traffic, the capacity of future wireless mobile systems needs to undergo several orders of magnitude growth in both traffic volume and transmission rate. Facing the daunting task in meeting exponentially growing demands for high data rates and mobility required by new wireless applications, wireless system designers have started research on fifth generation (5G) cellular systems. One of the most innovative and effective solutions to realize the 5G vision is to exploit a massive number of antennas. This technique, referred to as the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique, is expected to scale up the benefit of conventional MIMO by orders of magnitude compared to current state-of-the-art and thus has attracted considerable interest in both academic and industrial communities. However, current cellular networks operate in the already congested frequency bands below 6GHz. The mm-wave frequency spectrum from 30 to 300 GHz offers large swathes of unlicensed spectrum. Therefore, another promising solution to 5G is to explore and utilize this wide frequency band in order to achieve the future multi-gigabit wireless communications.

3. Superfast Mixed Signal Processing Platform.

Mixed signal processing (i.e., digital signal processing plus analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversions) is essential to a wide range of applications such as arbitrary signal generation, digital communications, radar, sonar, and acoustic systems, as well as antenna array systems. Prof. Huang has significant track record for high speed mixed signal processing system development for wireless communication applications such as the 10 Gbps microwave and mm-wave systems. In order to improve the processing power and enable multi-channel and wider bandwidth capability, further development is necessary to realize a superfast mixed signal processing platform for possible applications in high performance radar and 100 Gbps RF backbone link. The platform will combine multiple channels of high speed digital-to-analogue converters (DACs), multiple channels of high speed analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs), and the latest generation field programmable gate array (FPGA). Interfaces with external devices will be also integrated such as multiple 10/100 Gbps optical interface, USB interface and general I/O interfaces.