The Right Funding: NYU Wireless $2.5M for terahertz testing

NYU Wireless, founded by Ted Rappaport, may be the World's most respected research site In wireless. Tom Marzetta, whose Massive MIMO may be the most important advance in wireless this century, joined from Bell Labs. There are a dozen senior researchers and a slew of grad students and postdocs. 

Ted, the Prince of Millimeter Wave, was the first in the US to believe mmWave would work for 5G mobile. His teams took mmWave gear to really tough terrain, the buildings of Manhattan. Their results astounded the industry. A year later, everyone in wireless was investigating mmWave.

Marzetta and Rappaport now are doing leading research on "terahertz" for 6G. (Mostly actually a few hundred GHz,) We need that kind of work from academia, ten and twenty years ahead of what's being deployed.

A slew of other academics will share the facility. Federal funding for broadband deployment research has mostly gone to people who've contributed little of substance. I'm glad to see NSF is more selective.

From Ted:

NSF MRI Program awards new Terahertz Measurement Facility

We’ve just been notified that the National Science Foundation has awarded us a “Terahertz Measurement Facility” (Award 2216332), based on a National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal we submitted in January.

The winning project will allow NYU WIRELESS to purchase over $2.5MM in cutting-edge equipment which will support radio propagation and channel modeling for 6G, 7G and beyond, as well as RFIC Chip and on-chip antenna #measurement capabilities up to 500 GHz!

This 4-year award will build a cutting-edge measurement facility for the #wirelesscommunications and #semiconductor #design industries, and is the largest single #project grant I have ever been a part of. NYU Tandon School of Engineering has put in serious cash-matching, over $1.2 MM, in part due to the strong on-going financial support of the 16 global companies who support the NYU WIRELESS Industrial Affiliates program and hire our graduate students.

Key partners on our award-winning project are Univ. of Colo., Boulder (Zoya Popovic), Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln (Shuai Nie), a former MS student of mine who is now a new prof.), and Florida International Univ. (Prof. Arjuna Madanayake).

Profs. Davood Shahrjerdi and Mike Knox are key faculty with me on the New York University - Polytechnic School of Engineering side, where the new measurement facility will be located. The project proposal was led by my amazing PhD student Dipankar Shakya from #nepal who will develop and use the facility as part of his dissertation.

Our key vendors, who will be receiving a lot of purchase orders in the months and years to come, are Keysight Technologies, Virginia Diodes, Inc. and FormFactor Inc.

Thanks to so many of you who gave of your time and for your terrific letters of support, interest, valuable conversations, and suggestions that helped us write a strong proposal. We also had terrific support from our key vendors.

While it will take a few months to get all the budgets, charge numbers, and cost-sharing accounts from NYU aligned for product acquisition, and to ensure we are in compliance with federal regulations surrounding such high frequency bands, I wanted to share this exciting news!

With this grant and the ongoing support of the Industrial Affiliates of NYU WIRELESS, we will be able to remain at the forefront of radio propagation, channel modeling, wireless communication system design, material characterization, while we now expand into RFIC chip design and test/measurement up to 500 GHz.