A Lancaster University PhD student has won the prestigious ‘Best Student Paper Award’ at an important international engineering conference.

Rupa Basu received the award for the paper ‘On a D-band Travelling Wave Tube for Wireless Links’, which she presented at the IEEE International Vacuum Electronics Conference 2020, which was held virtually due to the ongoing coronavirus situation.

The paper is about new technologies to help deliver a new generation of wireless communications.

Ms Basu, along with her co-authors, in particular with Jeevan M. Rao, another Lancaster PhD student, have designed and built the first ever ‘Travelling Wave Tube’, to deliver high volumes of data exploiting the wide range of the spectrum above 140GHz for wireless communications.

The IVEC Best Student Paper Award selects the most outstanding, student-authored and presented paper with a student as the principal author and presenter. Students are considered as individuals pursuing a baccalaureate or graduate degree at the time of the conference, or during the past year when the work was completed.

The award includes an engraved plaque and a $500 prize.

Ms Basu said: “I feel elated to have received this prestigious award and would like to immensely thank my co-authors. I am beyond thrilled to be working on this state-of-the-art technology involving all domains of Engineering. Special thanks to Professor Paoloni for providing me with this opportunity and for his thought leadership, guidance and encouragement.”

The research forms part of the ULTRAWAVE project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme and is led by Professor Claudio Paoloni.

Professor Paoloni, Head of Engineering at Lancaster University, and supervisor of Ms Basu, said: “I am so excited and proud of Rupa receiving this international award. It fully recognises her talent, outstanding dedication and great teamwork in designing and developing an incredibly complex novel device we are producing at Engineering Department for the ambitious H2020 ULTRAWAVE project.

“On a personal note, it has also been a great emotion to share the virtual stage in my role of Chair of the IEEE EDS Vacuum Electronics Technical Committee, when Rupa received the award during IVEC2020.”

The ULTRAWAVE programme is a European Union Horizon 2020 funded project that is developing cutting edge technologies to make ubiquitous wireless data speed of up to 100 gigabits per second possible by exploiting the millimetre wave spectrum up to 300 GHz.

The ULTRAWAVE system will provide, for the first time, wide area coverage at millimetre waves by using significant transmission power that can only be generated through novel millimetre travelling wave tubes. The ultra-high data rate wireless layer will be enabled through the convergence of three technologies – vacuum electronics, solid-state electronics and photonics.

More information on the ULTRAWAVE project is available by visiting www.ultrawave2020.eu

The ‘On a D-band Traveling Wave Tube for Wireless Links’ paper’s authors are Rupa Basu, Laxma R. Billa, Jeevan M. Rao, Nicholas Renninson, Benjamin Rodgers, Q. Trung Le, Rosa Letizia and Claudio Paoloni.