Postdoctoral Researcher

Project summary:

The need for information identification and capture is a matter of prime importance in modern societies. Every sectors of society rely on the identification of data exchanged, the updating of the data recorded on a tag and the measurement of physical parameters. The ability to make objects interact with one another or with humans is an important factor in many applications, all the more so if this interaction can occur without human presence. The way to reduce power consumption, improve the communication quality-of-service and enhance connectivity has become key issues for lots of industries. Researchers need to consider the multiple factors simultaneously to design state-of-the-art RF devices for the next generation of identification services. One important direction is to develop low-power, low cost approaches for wireless identification and sensing. 

RF characterisation of dielectric materials is increasingly an important scientific and commercial activity insofar as even if a very significant effort of the RF community has allowed the development of reliable characterisation solutions, it remains that these techniques rely on RF test fixtures that is heavy to implement, expensive, with a limited field of use (type of materials, frequencies, resolution…) and therefore not adapted to the ever-increasing needs of companies, most of which have neither advanced skills in the field nor the equipment to implement these characterisation methods. Indeed, the explosion of the IoT and thus of wireless communication solutions has given rise to the need for companies in a wide range of sectors (not only specialised in electronics and even less in RF) to have a better understanding of the RF performance of the materials they use or wish to use for the fabrication of their devices. For cost or supply reasons, these companies are forced to use materials that are not necessarily suitable for RF (or simply whose RF characteristics are not known), typically plastics that under the same name may in fact have very different dielectric characteristics, particularly in terms of losses, and therefore pose a problem. The idea of the project is to demonstrate the technical and economic viability of a new solution for RF characterisation of dielectrics. This approach breaks with the techniques currently used insofar as it will make it possible to be able to characterise a larger number of materials (plates, solids, liquids, powders, etc.) at a lower cost compared with current solutions. We hope that in a few years this solution will become the reference solution for a large number of companies that until now have not access to these test fixtures.

Main goals:

Working directly with Professor Etienne Perret, your main task will be to carry out research into RF backscattering for dielectric characterisation. For the past 6 years, Etienne Perret has been working on a European ERC Consolidator Grant project on the subject of chipless RFID (https://www.scattererid.eu/). On the strength of this experience and the research results obtained (more than 25 articles in leading journals, 30 conference papers, etc.), the main task of the Post Doc will be to contribute to the ERC POC project RFmatCarac for Wireless Test fixtures to Measure the Dielectric Properties of Materials in RF. The aim of this European project is to evaluate the performance of a new wireless RF approach for characterising other forms of materials such as powders (like sugar, salt, flour) or liquids (water…). The main results of this work will be published in international journals. The post-doctoral fellow recruited to the RFmatCarac project and will be responsible for carrying out the theoretical and experimental parts of the project, which will enable us to evaluate the performance of the approach for characterising different dielectrics.

Keywords  : dielectric characterisation, Radio systems, RF design, Radar approaches, chipless RFID,.

Software : CST, HFSS, Matlab