Dec 4, 2025 | Center News
Mr. Marco Moller de Freitas, a PhD candidate at UD-WiSE, and his WiSE colleagues have published a paper in Nature Communications Engineering titled “Monolithically integrated ultra-wideband photonic receiver on thin-film lithium niobate.” The work details the design, fabrication, and testing of an ultra-wideband, antenna-coupled photonic receiver monolithically integrated on thin-film lithium niobate, demonstrating efficient millimeter-wave–to-optical conversion across a broad frequency range.
A free-space data link achieves transmission rates up to 2.7 Gbps using QAM, with error vector magnitudes as low as 3%, highlighting the potential of thin-film lithium niobate for next-generation high-frequency communication systems. The paper was subsequently selected by Springer Nature for inclusion in its prestigious 2025 Editors’ Choice collection.
Dec 4, 2025 | Center News
The 30-element planer array
WiSE ex-member Hannah Sinigaglio earned her PhD in 2025 for her groundbreaking research on RF-photonic spatial-spectral sensing.
Her work experimentally demonstrated the pivotal role of RF-photonic imaging receivers in next-generation wideband sensing at high carrier frequencies, enabling advances in radiometry, passive direction finding, and ultra-wideband spatial-spectral analysis.
Nov 7, 2025 | Center News
Cell-free MIMO system model
WiSE PhD candidates Shadia Chowdhury and Saheed Ullah presented their poster, RF-photonic Distributed Coherent Multiuser Beamforming, at the 2025 Brooklyn 6G Summit held November 5–7. Their work features the first proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of coherent zero-forcing beamforming at millimeter-wave frequencies implemented entirely in the analog optical domain. This milestone highlights the strong potential of ultra-wideband, ultra-low-latency RF-photonic beamforming for next-generation wireless systems.
Sep 29, 2025 | Center News
Smart agriculture robot powered by ARA
UD-WiSE PhD candidates Saheed Ullah and Shadia Chowdhury received travel grants to participate in the 2025 ARAFest workshop at Iowa State University, held September 27–28. ARA—the nation’s first rural wireless living lab—provides a unique platform for advancing wireless technologies tailored to agricultural and rural environments.
During the workshop, Ullah and Chowdhury explored how UD-WiSE’s cutting-edge photonic beamforming research could enable future collaborations in precision agriculture, aligning high-frequency wireless innovations with real-world rural applications.
Right to left: Saheed Ullah, Shadia Chowdhury, Rafid Umayer Murshed (fellow student participant from UIUC), and Prof. Hongwei Zhang, Director of ARA.
Oct 18, 2024 | Center News
UD-WiSE students and faculties attended the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology (PAST), on October 15-18, in Boston, MA.
- Dr. Janusz Murakowski, Professor Emeritus at UD-WiSE and Chief Technologist at PSI, Inc., presented the analytical framework of array-beam (AB) mapping between the element space and the beamspace of a phased array, and how it enables 3D beamforming to be implemented in a planer (2D) photonic integrated circuit (PIC)
- Ms. Hannah Sinigaglio, doctoral candidate at UD-WiSE, presented the first known real-time detection of radio frequency (RF) angles-of-arrival (AoA’s) by using PIC in the optical domain, at extremely low latency and power consumption
- Dr. Shouyuan Shi, faculty at UD-WiSE, presented a novel photonically assisted 2D transmit array using Fourier-based beamformer
Ms. Sinigaglio presents real-time analog-domain detection of angles of arrival
Aug 27, 2024 | Center News
Mr. Saheed Ullah with ARA Director, Dr. Hongwei Zhang
WiSE PhD student Mr. Saheed Ullah received a travel grant to attend ARAFest’24, a wireless technology workshop held on August 24-27, at Iowa State University.
ARA (Agriculture and RuRAl Communities) is the NSF-funded wireless technology Living Lab focusing on precision agriculture. Saheed gained valuable insights on how his research in distributed beamforming at mmWave can benefit wireless infrastructure for smart agriculture use cases, through live exchange with fellow wireless researchers and hands-on experimentations.
A 5G base station tower soaring into the bright summer sky of Iowa
