Academic Awards 2024 booklet

87 (A Guide to) Antenna Measurements in mm-Wave Reverberation Chambers The number of wireless devices in society is exploding. Did you know your phone has at least 10 antennas? Your car will have over 100 and a satellite may have over 1000? This leads to a problem you did not know existed: every antenna needs to be tested, and it also has to be done fast and accurate. Our society today does not accept a new smartphone with poor connectivity or too high radiation levels, or a car radar that is failing (and rightfully so). When an antenna is integrated, a device can only be tested wireless. Wireless testing is so complex that it can take months to interpret results. Many companies spend over a third of the development time spend on testing. In this research, we solved this problem with a reverberation chamber that can perform many tests over 100 times faster, and more accurate because it takes away positional sensitivity. It works as follows: the metallic interior ensures that all radiated information by the wireless device stays inside, and we use post-processing to extract it. We extended the operational frequency range of the chamber to the so-called millimeter-wave domain (referring to the size of the wavelength and used in e.g. 6G communications and radar) by changing its design and statistical processing algorithms. The chamber is now used by several companies as the key technology behind the TU/e spin-off company ANTENNEX. G Ref Frequency (GHz) 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 G Ref (dB) 30 60 80 100 120 140 Figure 1: The inside of the chamber wih 64 antennas under test in it, showing optimized geometries that turn (top left and on the right) to change the electromagnetic environment around the device. Figure 2: The measurement uncertainty of the chamber, described by the standard deviation when performing measurements with the antenna at a completely different position. This shows the positional insensitivity and broadband performance, making testing more reliable.