Wireless Systems for Electrical Engineering Applications

This course will teach you about wireless systems and their building blocks. These building blocks are addressed at their functional level in terms of transfer/gain, noise, linearity, frequency selectivity, bandwidth, and other relevant parameters. Physical constraints of practical semiconductor and passive components/circuits are used to identify a wireless system's achievable signal quality, selectivity, sensitivity, dynamic range, link budget, and other relevant figure-of-merit (FOMs).

The course introduces the concepts of modulation/demodulation, (mixer-based) up/down conversion, and (local-oscillator) based frequency generation, complemented with a discussion of transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) architectures. Impedance matching and RF instrumentation basics are explained to prepare you for working with practical wireless (sub) systems at RF frequencies. Given this, the common-core part of the course is complemented by hands-on training with RF characterization equipment like network and spectrum analyzers using practical circuits.

This course is completed by three (short) specialization topics, which can be followed based on your personal preference, namely: (1) Introduction to wireless power transfer technology, (2) Beamforming basics: concepts and architectures, (3) Neural Networks for Wireless en Radar Systems, Only one of these specialization topics is required to complete the overall course.

This course belongs to the RF/wireless profile. It is an excellent preparation for the course EE4605, Integrated Circuits for RF/Wireless Applications, which focuses on the design and realization of analog-intensive building blocks for wireless transceivers, as well as for ET4371, Advanced Digital Wireless transceivers, which is addressing the latest trends in RF/wireless design aiming to fully utilize the integration and signal processing strengths of advanced semiconductor technologies.