The title of the award winning paper is "A 5GHz All-Passive Negative Feedback Network for RF Front-End Self-Steering Beam-Forming with Zero DC Power Consumption.” Huang and Chi co-wrote this paper with their Ph.D. advisor Hua Wang, who leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and who holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship in the School of ECE.

In this paper, the team proposed and demonstrated an all-passive RF front-end phased-array beam-forming scheme that can autonomously form a receiver beam and track the direction of an unknown incident RF beam. The beam-former only consists of fully integrated passive components and consumes zero DC power. More importantly, the proposed beam-former processes the signal information in both phase and voltage domains, and the nonlinear conversions between the two signal domains are exploited to achieve a negative feedback loop with a large loop gain for high-accuracy phased-array beam-forming and autonomous beam-tracking.

A proof-of-concept, four-element self-steering beam-former is implemented in a standard 130nm CMOS process and occupies a tiny integrated circuit chip area of 4.1mm2. To the best of the team's knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an all-passive negative feedback network capable of performing front-end self-steering beam-forming with zero DC power. The demonstration of this all-passive scheme outperforms any reported active self-steering beam-formers that often consume hundreds of milli-watt or watts of power consumption.

This all-passive RF front-end self-steering phased-array beam-forming scheme can be widely employed in energy-constrained, large-scaled phased-array or MIMO systems, such as 5G communication and high-performance radars, low-power field-deployable sensors, and energy harvesting systems.