Two of our PhD students, Owen Kwok (supervised by Chinlon Lin) and Mable Fok (supervised by Chester Shu) won the 2nd runner up best paper award and the best presentation prizes respectively at the 6th IEEE LEOS (Hong Kong) postgraduate conference held at Hong Kong University on 3rd December 2005.

Well done to Owen and Mable!

Liang Tak Keung, a home grown PhD graduate of our department, won the Outstanding Thesis Award 2004 of the Faculty of Engineering. His thesis title is:

"Silicon Planar Lightwave Circuits: Raman Amplification and Polarization Processing"

Under the supervision of Professor H. K. Tsang, Dr. Liang has done excellent work leading to one of the world's first demonstration that silicon can be used to amplify light (achieving 6.8dB net gain in the first attempt).

Congratulation to Dr. Liang and Prof. Tsang !

Download the ABSTRACT of his thesis.

Wong Fai Leung (postgraduate student at the Microwave and Wireless Communication Laboratory) was awarded "Third Prize" in the IEEE Hong Kong Section 2004 (PG) Student Paper Contest.

There will be a prize presentation ceremony in March 2005. The ceremony will include technical presentations by the winners as well as the prize presentations.

The title of his paper is "Advanced Branch-Line Coupler Designs for Dual Band Communication Systems".

Wong Fai Leung (postgraduate student at the Microwave & Wireless Communication Laboratory) was awarded 1st Runner-Up in the Advance Program of the 5th IEEE (HK/Macau) AP/MTT Postgraduate Conference held at the University of Macau.

Paper Title: Novel Branch-Line Coupler Designs for Dual Band Applications

Author: F. L. Wong and K. K. Cheng

Abstract:
Branch-line coupler is a popular passive device for microwave and millimeter-wave applications. The standard design of branch line coupler offers specific power dividing ratio and phase relationship between the output ports over the operating bandwidth. Branch line coupler is commonly used as building blocks for balanced amplifier and mixers.

However, the conventional design of branch line coupler is basically consisted of quarter wavelength transmission lines which lead to inherent narrow band operation and as a result, its application to wide-band and multi-band system is thus greatly limited. In the past years, various reports concerning bandwidth enhancement and size reduction techniques have been published in the literature. Recently, dual band branch line coupler implemented using lumped elements was also reported.

In this paper, two novel planar 90?3-dB branch line coupler designs are presented. Both designs offer dual-band operation, low insertion loss and compact size. Basic operating principles of both configurations, practical implementation issues such as branch-line impedance realization are addressed. Finally, for experimental verification, both the simulated and measured results of 900/1800 MHz branch-line couplers constructed by microstrip technology are demonstrated.