ECE/EDS Seminar: Rod Kim (Stevens Institute)

Versatile RF-Interconnects for Harsh Environment Sensing and Communications

Future emerging applications like high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, 5G/6G-era communications, and brain-machine interfaces share a critical goal: massive information bandwidth scalability. To this end, my research group is investigating energy-efficient and bandwidth-scalable wireless/wired interconnect technologies emphasizing innovations in circuits, advanced packaging, and heterogeneous integrations for the above applications.

In the first part of this presentation, I will discuss technology gaps in information-carrying wiring harnesses and demonstrate low-loss millimeter-wave fibers for various applications like data center interconnect fabric and automotive/industrial harsh environment communications. In particular, I will illustrate the ceramic fiber’s capability of electromagnetic wave propagation, extreme heat tolerance, and extreme heat isolation assisted by automatic gain-controlled millimeter-wave CMOS transceivers.

In the second part, I will discuss the needs and challenges of large-scale cryogenic interconnects for future high-performance computing and illustrate a potential adoption of wireless/connector-less inter- connects between cryogenic devices and room-temperature electronics. As an initiative, we demonstrated the feasibility of removing thermally loaded wires/connectors between 7K and 290K thermal break and efficiently packing more data in a millimeter-wave carrier enabled by multi-level signaling and digital predistortion in CMOS technologies.

I will conclude the presentation with other research activities where massive scalability matters the most, their challenges and opportunities, and future directions.

Bio:
Rod Kim graduated from UCLA with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He is an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Before that, he developed low-noise sensors and communication systems at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2025 and a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2022. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques and a track editor for the IEEE Journal of Microwaves.

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