Timothy De Keulenaer received the "Nokia Belgium Scientific Award", awarded by the FWO/FNRS on 30 November in recognition of the PhD thesis that brings the most original contribution in the field of information and communication technology. Timothy De Keulenaer received his PhD degree from Ghent University on 23 June 2015 with his work entitled "A Duobinary Receiver Chip for 84 Gb/s Serial Data Communication". This research was supervised by prof. Johan Bauwelinck and prof. Guy Torfs in the IDLab research group of imec and UGent.
Datacenters require ultra-high-speed interconnects between servers to support applications such as high performance computing, network virtualization, social media and the Internet of Things. This outstanding work achieved a significant speed record for electrical links through backplanes and copper cables. So far, only a few teams around the world managed to demonstrate chips and fully functional subsystems for data links beyond 56Gb/s due to the huge technical challenges and development risks.
Taking advantage of duobinary signaling, a bandwidth efficient and energy efficient approach was developed with novel circuit architectures, outperforming competing technologies in terms of bit rate and reach. The intellectual property associated with this work is protected by 3 patent applications.
Published on:
4 December 2016
