Advised by Hua Wang, director of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and ECE’s Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor, Chi is conducting research for his Ph.D. thesis topic, "Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Signal Generation and Detection in Silicon.” This is the third year in a row that one of Wang’s Ph.D. students has been chosen for this award.

The IEEE SSCS Pre-doctoral Achievement Award recognizes Chi's three major research achievements in the field of RF/mm-Wave wireless circuits and systems through his Ph.D work.

Chi has demonstrated the world’s first mm-Wave full-duplex chip-to-chip communication link with 4Gbit/s data rate using the 45nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The technology can be directly applied in future full-duplex massive MIMO systems for high-throughput 5G applications such as vehicle-vehicle/vehicle-infrastructure communication, drone-based communication, and AR/VR. This work will be presented at the 2018 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), to be held in San Francisco from February 11-15.

He showed a novel antenna-electronics co-design methodology whose first implementation demonstrated a multi-feed antenna driven concurrently by multiple coherent signal sources, such as mm-Wave transmitters or power amplifiers, for on-antenna low loss power combining at mm-wave. This work achieved 4-times output power and 2-times efficiency improvement over state-of-the-art silicon-based transmitters at 60GHz, and this may serve as an enabling technology for future low-cost mm-Wave MIMO base stations and wireless infrastructures. This work was presented at the 2017 IEEE ISSCC, also held in San Francisco.   

Chi also led a project on "invisible sensor nodes," which utilizes THz (320GHz) carrier signals and nonlinear transmitter/receiver architectures to achieve a nano-scaled (mm^3) sensor platform. This platform supports a wide variety of miniaturized sensors and provides reliable meter-scaled wireless communication with 4.4Mbit/s data rate and micro-watt average power consumption. This was the world's first demonstration of leveraging THz carrier signals to realize ultra-miniaturization of low-power radio platforms. This technology opens the door to future massively field-deployable "invisible sensor nodes" and sensor networks for various defense and consumer applications, including Internet-of-Things. This work was presented at the 2017 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), held in Austin, Texas, and won the 2017 IEEE CICC Best Paper Award as the top paper among all the papers presented at the conference.