Electrical engineering alum Gang (Gary) Xiong ’11 PhD has been named Intel’s 2020 Inventor of the Year for his efforts in pioneering technologies that will underpin future wireless networks.
Based in Hillsboro, Ore., Xiong is a wireless standards engineer with the company’s Next Generation and Standards Group. He and members of this global team are determining how advanced 5G and 6G will carry even more throughput and responsiveness compared with today’s wireless standards.
According to Intel, Xiong and his team are focused on overcoming some of the limitations of 5G bands and getting ready for 6G:
We’re always pushing the boundary of what is physically possible by going back to basics and coming up with new ideas to overcome current obstacles,” he says. One idea Xiong and team are working on is changing the waveforms of future wireless signals, which could significantly affect how base station silicon is designed. “We’re imagining super wideband spectrums at perhaps 10 GHz or more that will mean at least 10x more throughput and 10x less latency than today’s 5G,” Xiong explains. “It’s a crazy idea that bumps against the ceiling of material physics, but we’ve already started early research and we’re confident we can pull this off.” If successful, this project—known in the industry as “terahertz communications”—will cement the groundwork for 6G and beyond.
As a PhD student at Lehigh, Xiong was advised by Shalinee Kishore, Iacocca Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and associate director of Lehigh’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE). His doctoral dissertation examined “Distributed Synchronization and Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks.”
Read the full story in the Intel Newsroom.
