Jae-Sung Rieh
The 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Radio Frequency Integration Technology (RFIT 2022) was held in Busan, South Korea, 29–31 August 2022. RFIT is an interdisciplinary advanced forum dealing with microwave and high-frequency microelectronics technologies. It serves as an opportunity to build the RF-integration technology communities and present the latest developments in RF circuit design, technology, and system integration.
IEEE RFIT has been held since 2005. The first meeting was held in Singapore, with subsequent meetings held biennially until the sixth conference, hosted by Hefei, China, in 2014, when it became an annual IEEE conference financially sponsored by the IEEE Microwave and Technology Society (MTT-S). Since then, it has rotated among five Asian and Oceanian countries: China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Australia. This year’s meeting was the 14th in the series and was organized by the Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science, with the MTT-S as the financial sponsor. Recent RFIT events include
The past two RFIT conferences were affected by COVID-19, leading to the conference format being either hybrid (in-person and online) (2020) or only online (2021). This year, after initial plans for the symposium to return to a fully in-person format, the decision was made to hold the meeting in a hybrid format, allowing both onsite and online participation. In the end, the hybrid format turned out to be a great option, as it accommodated the preferences of our presenters as well as our attendees.
The conference city of Busan is the second largest in South Korea and the fifth-largest port city in the world; it was selected by Lonely Planet in 2018 as the top destination in Asia. The venue of RFIT 2022 was the Hanwha Resorts Haeundae, which is located near the famous Haeundae Beach and the Dongbaek Island of Busan, with its magnificent seashore, the Gwangan Bridge, and Nurimaru APEC House. Haeundae is a must-visit site in Busan, well known for its 1.5 km of white, sandy beach, surely a highly attractive place for RF experts from all over the world!
RFIT 2022 was led by an organizing committee of distinguished researchers:
The TPC chairs invited 69 expert TPC members and organized subcommittees into the following 10 topic areas:
The RFIT 2022 ExCom served as an advisory committee, providing oversight and guidance for the symposium as a whole. Its members were Huei Wang (Taiwan) (chair), Rieh (Korea), Mohammad Madihian (United States), Wei Hong (China), Kamran Ghorbani (Australia), Noriharu Suematsu (Japan), and Goutam Chattopadhyay (United States).
More than 100 papers from 12 countries were submitted to the symposium. The peer review was done on the EDAS system, with at least three independent experts assigned to review each paper. Following this rigorous process, 95 papers were ultimately accepted, consisting of 38 invited papers, 26 regular papers, and 31 poster papers. This year’s symposium had more than 120 in-person attendees from 11 countries, and more than 50 researchers participated virtually. We were also joined by 15 sponsors and exhibitors. Among them were three corporations, which displayed their products and services during the symposium.
Figure 1. Night view of Busan, with the Gwangan Bridge shown in the forefront.
Figure 2. Prof. Mark Rodwell giving a plenary talk.
Figure 3. Prof. Songcheol Hong giving a plenary talk to the audience.
Figure 4. Prof. Jae-Sung Rieh, general chair, and one of the award recipients, Doyoon Kim of Korea University.
Figure 5. Attendees have a discussion in front of an exhibition booth.
Figure 6. Symposium organizers and key participants.
Prior to the symposium, we hosted two workshops on recent research results from applications and solutions of RF technology on Day 1. In the first workshop, “mm-wave/THz Integrated Beamforming Technologies,” Prof. Kenichi Okada (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Dr. Aoki Yuuichi (Samsung Electronics), Prof. Jungsuek Oh (Seoul National University), and Dr. Jinseok Park (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) covered exciting topics ranging from phased-array transceivers and packaging technologies, to low-Earth orbit satellite communications for 5G and 6G applications. In the second workshop, “RF Technologies for Emerging Biomedical Applications,” Prof. Kaiyuan Yang (Rice University), Prof. Joonsung Bae (Kangwon National University), Dr. Minyoung Song (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre), and Prof. Taekwang Jang (ETH Zürich) presented various wireless solutions for biomedical applications, including neural implants and chronic neural recording.
On the second day, the main symposium began with two plenary talks by Prof. Mark Rodwell (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Prof. Songcheol Hong (KAIST). In his presentation, “100–300 GHz MIMO Communications: Transistors, ICs, Arrays, and Systems,” Prof. Rodwell overviewed transistor technology, millimeter-wave (mm-wave) ICs, modules, and system design of 140-GHz massive multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) wireless hubs and 210- and 280-GHz MIMO backhaul links. Prof. Hong, in his talk, “Subarray Hybrid Beamforming Front-End ICs for Millimeter-Wave Communications and High Resolution Sensing,” presented a comprehensive overview of subarray hybrid beamforming structures in front-end ICs for 5G and 6G communication systems and sensing applications.
The technical program unfolded over days two and three and consisted of 14 oral sessions and one poster session. The oral sessions covered various topics in microwave and mm-wave/terahertz ICs, including signal generators, power amplifiers and their application to higher-level systems for communication, wireless power transmission, imaging, and radars. They also included sessions on high-frequency passive devices, antennas, metasurfaces, and emerging technologies. All the sessions were streamed on WebEx so that online attendees could access the presentations and ask questions. Also, the presenters who did not have the chance to attend the conference in person presented their work online through WebEx.
The poster session was also provided in two presentation formats: virtual and physical. For the former case, the virtual poster presenters uploaded a 5-min prerecorded video on the cloud platform (InfoVaya), which was played in a dedicated session room during the poster session. For the latter case, physical poster presenters brought printed posters to display on boards onsite in conjunction with poster files uploaded on InfoVaya.
In addition to real-time online services for the hybrid operation, attendees were also provided with on-demand access to all the presentation materials (videos, slides/posters) of the presented papers, recordings of the plenary talks, and recordings of our workshop lectures. These were seamlessly displayed on InfoVaya, which also provided the program details and attendee profiles, hosted fruitful discussions, and disseminated our conference proceedings.
As a special event, the Student Paper Competition was held on the second day. A total of 23 student authors competed for the Student Paper Awards under rigorous peer review (three reviewers per paper). The Award Committee selected 11 finalist papers, of which three winners were then selected based on their originality, concept feasibility, and presentation quality. The winners were Jia Zhang (first prize, Tsinghua University), Ilgwon Kim (second prize, KAIST), and Jae Young Sim (third prize, Yeungnam University), who were presented with their certificates and cash prizes during the meeting. We also awarded the RFIT Awards to presenters in the regular sessions for remarkable contributions in relevant subject areas. The three recipients were Seneke Ralalage Chamith Chandrarathna (Kyung Hee University), Kiryong Song (Samsung Electronics), and Sukhrob Abdulazhanov (Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems).
As usual, social events were also indispensable parts of RFIT 2022. The Welcome Reception was held the evening of the first day in the conference venue foyer. Symposium attendees, workshop organizers, and exhibitors as well as accompanying individuals enjoyed this icebreaking session over refreshments. A more formal gathering of all invited participants, the symposium Banquet, was held on the second day. After toasts by several prominent attendees, a nice buffet meal was provided, during which the Award Ceremony was also held.
The symposium received strong support from the following eight leading companies in the fields of RF-integration technology and mm-wave technologies:
We received further financial and technical support from the following noncommercial organizations:
All the RFIT 2022 information is posted on the conference website at http://rfit2022.org/. We have also produced a short video with key moments of the event, which is posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lTO62CuJlY.
We look forward to seeing all of you again at RFIT 2023 in Cairns, Australia.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2022.3220099