RF Design & Measurement Laboratory (incl. RF Shielded Room)

The shielded Radio Frequency (RF) Design & Measurement laboratory is a test center for MEMs and microelectronics. It contains Calgary’s most sophisticated wafer probe station for testing microscopic devices. This semi-automated wafer probe uses state-of-the-art integrated measurement technologies to achieve extremely high-precision on-wafer characterization of integrated circuits and MEMs.

This laboratory houses a roughly 16ft x 12ft RF shielded room that provides in excess of 60dB attenuation of ambient radio signals, such as cell phone transmissions, and allows the research team to perform interference free measurements of electrical circuits. The RF shielded room will be used to test novel RF circuits and antenna systems and will also assist with the research on RF Signals for navigation and location.
Inside the room is a Specific Absorption Ratio (SAR) robotic probe and 'phantom head' (Speag Twin SAM) that is used to assess the strength of electrical fields inside a human body. This SAR system performs precise measurements in the extreme near field within a gel that mimics the dielectric properties of human tissue. The gel is contained within a shell that is often referred to as a phantom head. By moving the probe around inside the mannequin researchers are able to characterise the electrical field inside a human head and the attenuation effect of placing RF sensors - such as our wireless temperature monitor - on a patient's temple. The two sided phantom enables the evaluation of left and right side usage of radio equipment as well as body mounted usage at the flat phantom region. The computer-controlled probe is mounted on a Staübli RX90 precision 6 axis robot arm that has a positional repeatability of better than 20um.

The laboratory also contains a 10 Gb/s bit error rate tester for designing and testing gigabit communications components.

The RFIC Design group is led by Dr. Jim Haslett