Naga Sasikanth Mannem has received a Predoctoral Achievement Award from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. Mannem is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) who works in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab. He is advised by ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang. 

The title of Mannem’s research is “Millimeter-Wave MIMO Transmitter Systems for Reliability, Security, and Sensing.” His research is primarily targeted at improving the communication reliability and security of phased array systems by employing circuit and architecture level techniques. 

Phased array systems are extensively being employed in 5G and emerging 6G communication systems to enhance communication distance, steer the transmitting beam towards the end-user, and for improved data rate through spatial MIMO. However, conventional phased arrays exhibit several inherent limitations such as reduced communication reliability due to antenna load variations and limited communication security. Moreover, they often need extremely precise beam alignment between the transmitting base station and the end-user; failure to do so results in degraded data rate. 

To achieve a reliable communication link even under large antenna load variations of 3:1 voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), Mannem and his colleagues proposed a Reconfigurable Hybrid Series/Parallel Doherty Power Amplifier. To improve the security of a communication link between a transmitter and the desired receiver, they exploit the inherent spatial selectivity that a phased array offers and extend its security performance by using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, realizing a truly directional and secure communication. Further, they proposed new array architectures to enable extremely precise beam alignment between transmitter and receiver in an array communication system. 

Mannem was a recipient of the ISSCC Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2021. He was a recipient of the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) best student paper award (2nd place) at RFIC 2021 and a co-recipient of the best student paper award 2nd place at IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS), 2021.