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20th November 2003 - The coveted Sir Henry Royce Award,
presented to young members of the Institute of Electrical
Engineers for ‘excellence’ in industry, is
to be awarded to Dr Roberto Ramirez-Iniguez of Optical
Antenna Solutions (OAS) Ltd from Coventry on Thursday.
Dr Ramirez, who is now Research and Development Manager
at OAS, will receive his award from Mr Frank Shaw, chairman
of the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation, at the IEE
Younger Members’ Conference and Dinner at the Botanical
Gardens in Birmingham.
“It is a great honour to be receiving this award
and I still cannot really believe it,” said Dr
Ramirez, a University of Warwick postgraduate who earlier
in the year was awarded his PhD in Engineering in the
field of Optical Wireless Communications.
Most of Roberto’s PhD work was related to the
design, fabrication and use of optical concentrators
for wireless IR communications. He was aware that by
designing receivers with a large effective collection
area and narrow optical bandpass the problems of path
loss and background light noise in an optical wireless
link could be reduced.
The problem of large area detectors is that their high
capacitance leads to an increase of thermal noise and
to a reduction of receiver bandwidth, and new ways to
increase the receiver collection area had to be found.
Also, it is desirable to use transmitters with a narrow
optical spectrum to allow the receiver to employ a narrowband
optical filter to reject ambient light radiation and
other sources of noise, and this had to be taken into
account too.
A solution to these problems is to use an optical concentrator
to improve the collection efficiency of the receiver
by transforming light rays incident over a large area
into a set of rays that emerge from a smaller area.
This implies that smaller photo-detectors can be used,
which decreases the capacitance, the cost, and improves
receiver sensitivity. The use of omni-directional and
directed concentrators used in conjunction with different
sorts of optical filters effectively screen out unwanted
ambient radiation and increase the effective area of
the receiver.
Roberto previously completed a master’s degree
in Communications and Real-Time Electronic Systems at
Bradford University and started his PhD work there under
the supervision of Prof. Roger J Green. When Prof. Green
moved to Warwick University to create the Communications
and Signal Processing (CSP) Research Group Roberto followed
him as he believes it to be one of the best universities
in the UK and it is highly ranked in research.
His involvement with OAS commenced towards the end
of Roberto’s PhD when the main focus of his attention
was his PhD thesis. At this point OAS’ optical
antenna, designed to provide infrared technology with
a new generation of high-collection-low-noise receiver
structures, was moving from academic research into a
commercial reality.
At the end of his PhD Roberto took the opportunity
to join OAS as its Research and Development Manager
and committed to develop the optical antenna further.
Alex Clarke, Marketing Manager for OAS, congratulated
Roberto: “Roberto was instrumental in creating
the success that came of taking our unique optical antenna
to market. As manager of our R&D team he has great
plans to further develop the antenna into a semi-conductor
component as a result of the worldwide success and industry-wide
interest we have received since the launch in November
2002.”
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