Rod Waterhouse
This article features an interview with Lars Foged, the scientific director at the Microwave Vision Group (MVG), about his perspectives and experiences in with this multinational corporation.
Editor’s Note
In this edition of the column, I “sat down” (virtually) with Lars Foged, the scientific director at the Microwave Vision Group (MVG). Lars is actively involved in our Society through conferences, volunteer committees, and standards; you’ve probably seen him multiple times at our flagship conference trade shows. Lars serves on our Industry Initiatives Committee and is also the 2023 president-elect for the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA). In this interview, I wanted to get his views on trade shows (from a company’s perspective) as well as other industry activities, such as potential supply change issues; collaborating with universities; hiring people; standards; and future directions in the antenna measurements area. Hope you find this interesting.
Rod Waterhouse: Can you give us a brief history of MVG?
Lars Foged: MVG began as the SATIMO (Societe d’Applications Technologiques de Imagerie Micro-onde) in 1986. It was a spin-off from the French engineering school, SUPELEC. For many years, the company was latent, investigating different applications for electromagnetic field measurements based on multiprobe technology. The company underwent a significant transformation after about 15 years later. Many of the current managers joined during this transformation, including myself. We were a team of young individuals, with antenna design backgrounds and the ambition to change the antenna measurement community. Our aim was to create innovative and appealing technology making measurements an integral part of the antenna development process.
Over the years, business has grown steadily, both from internal growth and by strategic acquisitions. Today, MVG is a multinational corporation and the world’s largest provider of turnkey antenna measurement solutions.
Waterhouse: The last couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of things impacted by the pandemic, with trade shows being one of them. An alternative put out there for shows/conferences was virtual exhibits. Did your company attempt to do this? If so, did you think they were successful?
Foged: The last year’s COVID situation has brought many changes. As a company highly dependent on communication, we were suddenly forced to look at new ways to operate. For MVG, tradeshows and conferences are highly important. Initially, we fully embraced participation using virtual models, but eventually, we found it increasingly difficult to network and capture a significant audience without physical contact. For this reason, we welcome the return to normality with regard to trade shows and conferences.
However, considering academic/industrial courses and workshops, also constituting an important part of our communication, we have seen a democratization in virtual mode as we are able to reach a higher number of participants in more geographically spread areas on the virtual platforms than we did before. There are certain aspects of our communication that have seen a benefit from the new situation.
Waterhouse: Trade show participation appears to be getting back to prepandemic numbers. Why are trade shows so important for industry?
Foged: In-person participation at trade shows and conferences is an important personal contact component of networking. This includes the visual impact of being present, getting inspired by something unexpected. Some of the virtual platforms tried to generate the same personal atmosphere for the online participants, but engineers are probably not ready for this yet.
Waterhouse: A lot of companies are now being impacted by supply chain issues. Is MVG?
Foged: Being able to control the supply chain has become an important reality for companies. MVG is maybe less impacted by this reality as it has been able to shift from unavailable components and materials from some suppliers to others. An important change we are seeing is that the supply chain is now considered an equal part of the development cycle. Today, the availability of materials is an important consideration in the development of new and existing products.
Waterhouse: Switching gears, do you collaborate with universities? Why?
Foged: Due to our strong academic background, MVG is well connected with academia and monitors ongoing development in universities and publications to keep informed. We regularly invite professors to discuss research or invite students to our different sites as part of their thesis. Such collaborations offer employment opportunities and/or valuable exchange on the human and scientific levels.
MVG also often participates in regional and/or public joint R&D projects and may come together with partners this way. For example, we have worked on multipartner projects with international organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA); the French (CNES) and Italian (ASI) space agencies; and the European Commission (EC), among others. We also collaborate with academic and industrial partners in standardization committees. The industry and its norms are in constant evolution, and both industry and academia assist in and benefit from advancing standards.
There are both advantages and disadvantages for a company when doing collaborative research with external partners. The key to successful collaboration is the willingness to compromise by all parties such that the advantages outweigh the possible disadvantages. Both academic and industrial partners must achieve their objectives in the collaboration.
Looking at the advantages, one of them is cost. In a company–university collaboration, a project can be more cost-effective when both parties bring valuable prior knowledge to the project, assuming the research institution has cutting-edge knowledge in the specific field of interest. Industry is driven by profit, margins, cost management, and time to market, and when it comes to innovation, this can be a hindrance. Seeking innovation is risky, and even successful scientific development does not always lead to a successful business case. How much we want to or can invest in innovation as a company must always be considered. In academia, original research is the main scope. Securing funding is important, of course, but research, education, and discovery are equally driving forces from which innovation flourishes. Combined research efforts between industry and academia are generally a good way to secure access to external funding and thus minimize the financial risks. Combining efforts, resources, and sources of financing generates the best results.
A second benefit is synergy. Collaborative projects between industry and academia can make for effective synergy when certain conditions are met. As a company, we are interested in industrializing technology and concepts as useful products for our customers. Academia looks for validation or proof of concept of ideas and scientific recognition. When opportunities arise to coordinate and cooperate, both parties achieve much more. The synergy emerges when development is assisted by academia, and validation and industrialization are provided by the partnering company’s expertise. It becomes a win–win situation.
Waterhouse: Can you give an example of a successful collaboration you’ve had?
Foged: In an ongoing project, MVG is working on the development of a microwave breast imaging scanner for the detection of breast pathologies. This is a special application of our microwave multiprobe technology. In the frame of this project, MVG is working with the National University Ireland Galway (NUIG), in Galway, Ireland, to carry out early-stage clinical investigations. The university, through its Clinical Research Facility, is benefitting from our industrial capabilities to develop the device, and as a university clinical research center, they have credibility with the public in the medical domain for the studies and trials necessary for the development of the device. Their closeness yet neutrality with the medical world is also a guarantee that the project progresses according to a certain level of objectivity. So, the synergy created between the two organizations has not only forwarded the innovation; it is leading to larger picture improvements for humanity.
Another multiyear and very successful collaboration resulted in the development of our INSIGHT postprocessing software. We developed this software in collaboration with the Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
Back in 2001 and during the transformation of MVG (then SATIMO), it became our cornerstone strategy to make antenna measurement an integral part of the antenna design cycle. Until then, measurements had been considered an annoying pass/fail test of product development. The massive potential feedback available in measurement was not realized by the public. To be successful, MVG needed to develop postprocessing technologies for measured data giving the user the same level of information on the measured antenna that could be found in a numerical simulation. Furthermore, we set out to find the “electromagnetic glue” that could enable measured antennas to be used as sources in simulations.
At the time, MVG was a small company and could not undertake such massive developments. A partnership with academia and software houses was the only solution. We also recognized that although extremely desired and promising, the “electromagnetic glue” was distant enough from the core MVG technology and could be considered for external collaboration. We carefully selected the Politecnico di Torino to assist in the development needed to bridge the gap between measurements and simulations. A strategic partnership to develop the software tool now known as INSIGHT was born and is still running today. The collaboration scope, defining what each partner set out to achieve, including agreement on proprietary rights and scientific merits, is the cornerstone of this successful collaboration.
Through the years, the project has been funded through internal and external funding schemes. The ESA was one of the first institutions to see the value in this partnership and provided support and encouragement. Software houses have also been involved in case-by-case bases. INSIGHT is now an integral part of an advanced postprocessing software package marketed by MVG and compatible with numerical simulation packages from most vendors in the world. As a result of this collaboration, MVG leads the industry in bringing measurements and simulations together, and the Politecnico di Torino is considered the reference academic institution for these and related techniques.
Waterhouse: I mentioned before that you are actively involved in our standards committee. Why is this important?
Foged: Participating in a major academic/industry project like the facilities comparison campaign that has been running for more than 15 years, as we discussed before, is an important example of collaboration that helps the general community. The same goes for our activities in standardization bodies. We are very active in these organizations, such as institutions such as IEEE; the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA); the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP); and the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA). Here, the objectives of collaboration between these entities are not to give individual technological advantages or develop new tools but rather to study common topics of interest and formulate common practices in antenna measurement.
We understand that as an industry, we need standardization, and as a company, we need to be involved and participate with inputs toward those standards. Academia also needs to be present because, though industrial knowledge is important, we are usually not inclined to expose our internal know-how to the public, whereas it’s the whole purpose behind university R&D to disseminate results in such venues. Overall, we see that many of the investigations, the basis for a lot of the standards, come from university work.
Waterhouse: What do you look for in new hires in your company?
Foged: MVG is a distributed organization, with many offices around the world. This requires a high level of collaboration between the offices. We often joke between us that MVG must be one of the smallest multinational groups in the world, or at least it used to be as it was a multinational company from the very beginning. Such an organization places special requirements on our workforce.
As with many other organizations, we have difficulty in finding the right people for all our vacant positions. We are looking for people who are open minded and communicative across borders, gender, religion, politics, etc. Technical skills are important, of course, but the ability for ample collaboration is a key requirement for MVG employees. In view of the difficulty in finding qualified people in traditional antenna measurements, we are looking to attract individuals with a solid foundation in electromagnetics, physics, and/or mathematics but not necessarily with specific knowledge in measurements. At the entry level, we offer on-the-job training in our different facilities to enhance the global team spirit and to make sure that all employees have knowledge about the unique MVG measurement solutions.
Waterhouse: What are the future directions in antenna measurements?
Foged: That’s another interesting question. Antenna measurements have significantly changed in the last few years. When I first joined the world of antenna measurements, more than 25 years ago, it was very much about the precision mechanical movements of the antenna to be tested. Antenna systems were based on large anechoic chambers and large reflectors and mostly in the far field. These systems were built by mechanical people for the electrical engineers wanting to test their antennas. Postprocessing techniques were met with skepticism; “if your measurements need correction, it is because you don’t have a sufficiently good mechanical system” was the doctrine. Since then, near-field techniques that require processing to determine the FF have become very popular due to their accuracy and compactness with the arrival of multiprobe technology, one of the fastest measurement techniques today. Other techniques have also joined since then.
Postprocessing has opened the door for much more extensive processing of measured data and the mixing of measurements and simulations, playing on the inherent strengths of both. The old-fashioned canonical scans, dictated by the limitations in postprocessing at the time, have been replaced by more suitable surfaces also enabled by the flexibility of robots and drones. Lastly, the need to test the antenna as a complete transmit/receive system, often as hardware-in-the-loop to test all functionalities, is now a common procedure in space, military, and telecommunication applications. We have only scratched the surface of the flexibilities of array-based measurement systems to generate complex realistic testing scenarios in the laboratory.
About Lars Jacob Foged
Lars Jacob Foged received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, USA in 1990. He is the scientific director of the Microwave Vision Group. He was a member of the EURAAP Delegate Assembly and responsible for the Working Group on Antenna Measurements from 2009 to 2012. He was the vice-chair of the EUCAP conference in both 2011 and 2022; industrial chair in 2012, 2014, and 2017; and technical program chair in 2016 and 2021. In 2004, he became the secretary and is now vice-chair of the IEEE Antenna Standards Committee. In 2016 and 2017, he led the Industry Initiatives Committee (IIC) of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S). He is a board member and course organizer at the European School of Antennas (ESOA) since 2006. He is the 2023 president-elect, a fellow, and a Distinguished Achievement Award recipient of the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA). He has authored or coauthored more than 300 journal articles and conference papers on antenna design and measurement topics and received the Best Technical Paper Award at the 2012 AMTA symposium and the Best Measurement Paper Award at the EUCAP 2021 conference. He coauthored the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) book Postprocessing Techniques in Antenna Measurement in 2019 and the Artech House book Modern Automotive Antenna Measurements in 2022, and he made contributions to five other books and standards and holds four patents. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
I believe we will see and need many more integrated and multidisciplinary test systems in the future. The conducted RF and the radiated test system will eventually become inseparable. As the testing needs flourish, it will attract engineers and researchers to be enthusiastically involved in the development of these future test systems. This is also a not-so-hidden message to young engineers that challenging and exciting careers await in this field.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2022.3223638