INESC TEC makes a €300 000 investment in lab equipment

The investment was made in the scope of TEC4SEA strategy, which was recognised by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) as the main marine-related R&D technological infrastructure, in order to provide support for research, development and ocean technologies tests, including marine robotics, monitoring ocean systems, wireless communication systems and acoustic systems.

In order to provide “wire bonding” services, a known technique that guarantees the link between the pins of integrated circuits and the corresponding packages, a Wire bonder was acquired. Besides providing services, this equipment will allow INESC TEC to complete the integrated circuits tests on existing projects and PhD theses faster.

The newly acquired Vector Network Analyzer provides the capacity to measure the frequency response (amplitude and phase) of active and passive circuit of up to 4-ports in the 10MHz – 43.5 GHz and 75 – 110 GHz bands. Some applications that benefit from this capacity are 5G wireless communications, including satellite communication, automotive radars in the 77 GHz/79GHz bands, airport radars in the 94 GHz bands and materials characterisation. In fact, the increasing use of frequency bands of millimetre waves for high speed radar-communication systems suggests the need of characterising dielectric properties of several materials at high frequencies.

The new Arbitrary Waveform Generator with 5GHz of bandwidth makes possible the generation of high-bandwidth arbitrary signal for different applications, such as terrestrial wireless communication and satellite communication, video and radar transmission, among others. A new modulation analysis software (89600 Vector Signals Analysis Software) was also acquired. The software can demodulate any wireless standard (WLAN 802.11ac, 802.11n, 802.11a/b/g, WiMAX, Blue-tooth, Zigbee, RFID) or mobile standard (LTE- Advanced, LTE, W-CDMA HSPA+, GSM/EDGE Evolution, cdma2000®, TD-SCDMA), as well as demodulate custom modulations (OFDM/APSK).

Two existing equipment were also updated. One of them was the spectrum analyser that began to support 50GHz of maximum frequency (instead of 26.5 GHz) valid to the 75-110 GHz band, through a smart harmonic mixer , including 160 MHz of demodulation bandwidth and real-time capacity analysis (which is capable of detecting sporadic signals with a minimum duration of 15 μs). The other updated equipment was the real-time sampling oscilloscope as it now supports 6 GHz of maximum frequency (instead of 2.5 GHz), including 20 GSamples/s in 4 independent channels and 1 Gpts of memory.

Other equipment were purchase, such as: A Spectrums analyser/ portable 6.5 GHz Vector Network Analyzer; an Arbitrary Waveform Generator – 120 MHz; a LCR meter – 500 kHz.

In the context of TEC4SEA, INESC TEC seeks to become a pivotal global institution on R&D technologies and solutions to meet the challenges of the ocean and build credit on marine economics through sustainable approaches to explore the living and non-living ocean resources. TEC4SEA is formed by a multidisciplinary team: INESC TEC (coordinating institution), CINTAL (University of Algarve), CINAV (Shipping Research Centre) and INESC R&D Brazil.

Besides this laboratory, the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory (with 2 100 m2 test tank), the Imaging Laboratory and Laboratory of Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments also collaborate in TEC4SEA infrastructure.

TEC4Health, which is related to health field, is another research line that benefits from this investment.