High visibility for research results

Bharath Kumar Cimbili has been working as a researcher in high-frequency electronics at Fraunhofer IAF since October 2020 and is conducting research in the EU program MyWave in close collaboration with the partner company Ericsson. He is working on highly efficient power amplifiers in the E-band frequency spectrum, which is being targeted for satellite and mobile communications.

How does your work benefit from collaborations?

I think the partnerships, like the one with Ericsson for example, can increase our visibility. For instance, the power amplifier circuits that I designed previously are producing state-of-the-art results and Ericsson is interested in buying these samples for their applications (5G base stations) to demonstrate them to their customers across the world. This partnership increases the visibility for both, me as the researcher as well as the GaN technology that Fraunhofer IAF offers for millimeter-wave designs.

What makes working at Fraunhofer IAF especially attractive from your point of view?

I think one of the best advantages I have compared to the other participants in the MyWave program is the in-house fabrication we have at Fraunhofer IAF. I don’t have to depend upon external partners to manufacture my chips. Instead, we have our own facilities through which we get first-hand information about the manufacturing process. This allows us to optimize our circuits to achieve the best possible performance and further improve our designs.