ANTERRA PhD Satellite front-end system for non-terrestrial 6G

The European Doctoral Network 'ANTERRA' offers 15 fully funded industrial PhD student positions in the area of antennas, integrated circuits and signal processing, starting in the autumn of 2022. ANTERRA is focussed on Antenna Systems for 6G Non-Terrestrial Networks. The consortium consists of 14 leading European R&D laboratories from universities, industries, and technology institutes in the domain of satellite communication and wireless infrastructure which are located in The Netherlands, France, Sweden, Italy and Belgium.

Research
Our society is on the brink of a new age with the development of new visionary concepts such as internet of things, smart cities, autonomous driving, smart mobility, and coverage everywhere. This stimulates the use of new deployment concepts, such as extreme densification or Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN),to support the wireless communication evolution. For 6G, a key use case which stands unaddressed by prior telecommunication generations, is that of coverage everywhere. One of the major reasons for not addressing this use case thus far is the lack of expertise about non-terrestrial communication in the classical (terrestrial) telecommunication industry. The European research project ANTERRA addresses this issue by training 15 PhD students on antenna systems for NTN, one of the key aspects to successfully implement coverage everywhere.

In ANTERRA, the research fellows will investigate particular aspects of the system concept. For this, they will take a system view by investigating architectural needs and constraints from which they will develop novel multi-functional high-gain antenna architectures that exhibit a large coverage. Moreover, innovations in energy efficient highly integrated radio front-ends is a key enabler towards more efficient, high performance radio-access hardware for satellite nodes. Research in novel synchronization and beam-finding techniques will lead to stable integration of all network nodes into one global 6G NTN. All concepts will be optimized to meet the requirements of NTN antenna systems.

This vacancy concerns the PhD position on Satellite front-end system for non-terrestrial 6G. The aim of this PhD project is to develop innovative phased arrays architectures for 6G satellites, that must radiate multiple beams in Rx/Tx with high gain over a wide angular sector in reconfigurable frequency bands, while complying with severe power consumption and accommodation constraints. New concepts based on deployable phased arrays must be explored with integrated radiating elements with wide angle scanning capability over multiple bands, with hybrid beamforming (RF, digital, photonic), distributed filtering and amplification, resulting in a low profile, integrated and deployable antenna. The expected outcome of this project is an assessment of several antenna architectures based on different approaches. The key building blocks must be designed and prototyped. Moreover, specifications of key building blocks for other PhD projects shall be derived.

Training programme

ANTERRA will provide the PhD students with a comprehensive set of theoretical and practical skills relevant for innovation and long-term employability in a rapidly growing sector. This highly innovative training will cover several inter-disciplinary areas as shown in the figure below. Each PhD student will be enrolled in a doctoral programme and will have two official employers, one from academia and one from industry. Highly qualified personnel from both employers will jointly coach the PhD student.