Zachary Fritts awarded Predoctoral Fellowship to support research on time-varying, electrically-small antennas

Zachary Fritts, Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to support his research on time-varying, electrically-small antennas (ESAs) and systems. These ESAs are important, for example, in telecommunications and in biomedical or sensing applications, where the antenna is often the size-limiting component of the system.

His proposed dissertation title is “Parametric Electrically-Small Antennas with Enhanced Efficiency-Bandwidths through Spatially-Discrete Traveling-Wave Modulation.”

“Amidst the rapid technological advances leading to high-speed electronic devices with small form factors, there is one technology that cannot easily be miniaturized: antennas,” explains Fritts. “This is because antenna size scales with wavelength. Antennas that are small compared to the wavelength of operation can either be efficient or broadband, but they cannot be both – a tradeoff quantified by the ‘efficiency-bandwidth product.’ The bandwidth of an antenna determines the maximum rate at which it can transmit or receive information, so it is important to overcome limits on the efficiency-bandwidth product of electrically small antennas (ESAs).”

“An analogy may illustrate the difficulty of surpassing the bandwidth limitation of small antennas. Efficient ESAs are narrowband, which means that they tend to resonate around a single frequency, much like a piano string plays a single note. The goal of my research is analogous to finding a way for a single piano string (small antenna) to play ten adjacent notes simultaneously.”

Recently, Fritts co-authored an article focused on this research that was featured by the homepage of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He talks more about the research in this story.

Fritts and his team members have already discovered a way to improve the efficiency-bandwidth product of electrically-small antennas by up to a factor of ten; they applied for a U.S. patent.

Fritts received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Pittsburgh. He received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and has proven to be an effective mentor to others in his research group. His work with an undergraduate student led to a joint journal article, and his work with a master’s student has resulted in an upcoming journal submission. He works closely with Dr. Steve Young, another member of Prof. Anthony Grbic’s research group, and is advised by Grbic, the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering.

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The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports students who are working on dissertations that are “unusually creative, ambitious, and impactful,” and who expect to complete their dissertations during their 3-term fellowship period. Students receive a stipend of more than $40K, tuition, fees, and insurance.