Winner Announced For The 2017 FEKO Student Competition

Xidian University student designs a MIMO antenna for smart phone 

TROY, Mich., Dec. 12, 2017 – Altair Engineering Inc. (Nasdaq: ALTR) is pleased to announce that Ke Li, a first year PhD student from Xidian University in China, is the winner of the 2017 FEKO Student Competition. This annual international contest organized in support of engineering education and academic excellence, is now in its 15th year and continues to generate global interest, attracting entries from South Africa, China, India and the USA this year. The competition is designed for students interested in antennas, microwave devices, bio-electromagnetics, electromagnetic compatibility, and other electromagnetic related fields and gives them the opportunity to showcase their work with FEKO^®, the electromagnetic solver of Altair HyperWorks^®. 

"By using FEKO, the students gain experience with a leading computational electromagnetic (CEM) tool that is widely used in industry. This experience will be very useful in their future engineering careers,” explains Matthias Goelke, senior director – Business Development Academic Markets at Altair.

Ms. Li’s winning entry, entitled Wideband MIMO Handset Antennas based on Theory of Characteristic Modes, covers a dual multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna design for a smart phone operating in the LTE 13, GSM850 and GSM900 bands. Typically, it is challenging to achieve good MIMO performance due to the limited space available for good element separation as well as the wide bandwidth that is required. FEKO's characteristic mode analysis was used to optimize the element placement and feeding, which enabled the desired modes to be excited on the ground plane. This in turn resulted in good pattern diversity and excellent ECC across the bands. The design was built, S11 and gain were measured, which agreed very well with the simulation results. 

“The quality of entries this year was exceptionally high so we decided to award two honourable mentions in addition to the winning project,” said Matthias Goelke. These were Vignesh Monohar from UCLA, California, USA and Vinoth Kumar from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.

“I feel so excited and am very grateful for this award. I would like to thank the judges for recognizing my work – giving me great encouragement for my future career,” said Ms. Li on receiving the news of her win. “As a student majoring in electromagnetics, the FEKO software gives us so many resources and tools to solve EM problems.” Ke Li’s advisor, Yan Shi, receives this year’s supervisor award.

The winning project, along with the honourable mentions are available for download via this link (http://web2.altairhyperworks.com/feko-student-competition-2017-winners). Details on the 2018 FEKO Student Competition will be launched in March 2018 on the Altair University website.