The use of spectrum in millimeter bands is becoming essential to enable future wireless networks to offer significant capacity gains. However, as propagation losses become significant, antenna and beam formation become key elements in maintaining a reasonable range and limited infrastructure costs. Phased array antenna solutions require a very large number of RF chains and are expensive. The project aims to develop innovative alternative solutions based on reconfigurable metasurfaces. The work will focus on three areas of research: the practical implementation of such antennas in the EHF bands, technical and algorithmic solutions enabling the antennas to address several users simultaneously, and the rapid reconfiguration of the beams adapted to the radio channel. To reach the aforementioned objectives, the project will first precise scenarios and usages, highlight mmWave radio channel constraints, and provide recommendations on metasurface based antenna design. This will be performed in WP1 during the first 6 months. WP2 addresses the design of electronically steerable antennas based on an array of unit cells having the possibility to reflect/transmit impinging waves from the feeder(s) with a phase shift in a predefined set including zero phase shift. To ensure reconfigurability of these unit cells, a control system will be defined and implemented. Unit cells will be optimized so that their phase shift remains within a given percentage of its nominal values over the bandwidth of interest. Two prototypes will be implemented in WP2: first a full antenna system including an electronically controlled transmitarray, the multi-element focal systems and the digital control will be designed, optimized, fabricated and fully characterized by CEA Leti in the 26-28 GHz band. The antenna system will be able to generate at least four independent beams. The know-how of CEA Leti on transmitarrays is almost unique and has been mostly developed during a long collaboration with the IETR antenna team. Coding metasurface for cmWave and mmWave are currently developed in DOME group at IEMN. In the framework of a partnership with DGA, the main goal has been to propose artificial structures for Radar Cross Section reduction. In this project, as an alternative to absorbing layers previously studied in the group, the idea is to deviate the incident beam in one or several directions out of the detector spatial range. This approach can also be used to select the beam reflection direction. Regarding the size reduction inherent to frequency increase up to 60 GHz, an external company (INODESIGN) will be in charge of the fabrication. CSAM group of IEMN will bring its expertise in mmWave tune able structures using semi-conductor switching devices. The characterization of the reflectarray will be carried out at the telecom platform of IRCICA institute. To this aim, the 60 GHz anechoic chamber, already available at IRCICA, will be completed with a Newport monitored platform allowing an accurate angular control. In WP3, BF will be studied for both single and multi-user cases assuming possibly more than one stream per user. The optimization of the grid can be performed off line (using predefined codebooks) or dynamically by applying algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), or deep learning (DL) approaches. The CNAM and Orange will provide their expertise in that domain to design and implement these algorithms. Performance evaluation of the prototypes and BF algorithms will be performed in a real environment in WP4 with channel sounder, or an SDR approach. This WP will be led by Orange, with contributions of all the partners, to ensure an efficient exploitation of MESANGES results in 5G+ and 6G networks.

Designing highly efficient Organic Semi-Conductors (OSCs) for Organic Electronics (OE) has led to the fantastic development of this technology. In this context of OE, Phosphorescent Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (PhOLEDs) are the 2nd generation of OLEDs (after fluorescent OLEDs) and have encountered a significant development for the last twenty years as they can in principle reach internal quantum efficiency of 100% by harvesting both singlet and triplet excitons. PhOLED technology is more mature than the recent 3rd generation of OLEDs based on Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence (TADF). A PhOLED uses a Host-Guest EMitting Layer (EML) which consists in a Triplet Emitter (Guest) disperses into an appropriate OSC (Host). For the last decade, the design of high triplet energy (ET) hosts (>2.7 eV), essential to be used with red, green and blue phosphors, has been an intense research field worldwide and has led to high-efficiency multi-layer PhOLEDs. This proposal finds its origin in an important fact of the literature: Almost all the high-efficiency PhOLEDs are multi-layer devices. These multi-layer PhOLEDs are constituted of a stack of organic layers in order to improve the injection, transport and recombination of charges within the EML. There are usually in a PhOLED stack, hole and electron transporting layers, hole and electron blocking layers and these layers are even often doubled. Despite the technology is mastered, it suffers from the complexity of the stack, a high-cost, and is time-consuming. In addition, interfacial phenomena can lead to parasite emissions and a low stability. Simplifying the multi-layers structure with the so-called Single-Layer PhOLEDs (SL-PhOLEDs), the simplest device only made of the electrodes and the EML is therefore one key step for the future. However, high-efficiency SL-PhOLEDs are very rarely reported in literature (especially blue emitting devices), due to the lack of host materials possessing all the required properties. In SPIRO-QUEST proposal, we aim to address this feature through the design of universal host materials for high performance red, green and blue SL-PhOLEDs. The goal of this project is to gather in a single molecule all the required properties to insure the energy transfers cascade within the PhOLED (particularly a high triplet state energy level), a high thermal/morphological stability for device lifetime, adequate HOMO/LUMO levels for charge injection and more importantly a good and well balanced mobility of electron and hole (ambipolar character). This ambipolarity is a key property for SL-PhOLED. To fulfil all the above mentioned criteria, this project uses a Donor-Spiro-Acceptor molecular design which implies the judicious connection of a Donor unit to an Acceptor unit. One of the novelty of this proposal is the nature of the donor unit which is a new electron rich fragment: the Quinolinophenothiazine. This fragment is highly promising as shown in preliminary works led by this consortium. Thus, molecular design of host materials is the heart of this proposal, which possess very solid foundations as demonstrated by preliminary results published in the last 30 months. As the development of new materials leading to high efficiency devices is one of the key direction of OE, SPIRO-QUEST targets striking results. More precisely, we aims to go beyond the state of the art in term of performance and stability of SL-PhOLEDs. This multidisciplinary project is led by three complementary research groups, internationally recognized in their fields. SPIRO-QUEST involves a group specialized in chemistry of pi-conjugated systems (C. Poriel/J. Rault-Berthelot, ISCR - Rennes), a group specialized in microelectronics and especially in charge transport (E. Jacques, IETR- Rennes) and a group specialized in physics of OLEDs (D. Tondelier, Ecole Polytechnique - LPCIM).

SKA computing will be a pioneer HPC challenge tackled by Dark-Era. The exascale radio telescope Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will require supercomputers with high technical constraints. The Science Data Processor (SDP) pipeline in charge of producing the multidimensional images of the sky will have to execute in realtime a complex algorithm chain from data coming from telescopes at an incredible rate of several Tb/s and without any storage capabilities. The SDP will also have to be as green as possible with an energy budget of only 1 MWatt for 250 Petaflops. Such energy and computation requirements imply the SDP to be an innovative dataflow oriented and heterogeneous architecture. This supercomputer will be based on a standard HPC system combined with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) or application-specific architectures like Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) or the manycore Kalray Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA). One crucial challenge is to assess the performance both in time and energy of new complex scientific dataflow algorithms on not-yet-existing complex computing infrastructures. It will be hardly possible without efficient co-design methods and rapid prototyping tools. SimSDP is a rapid prototyping tool for SKA-like dataflow applications developed by the Dark-Era project. Through an original mixed approach based on execution and simulation, SimSDP purpose is to provide early analyses in terms of memory usage, latency, throughput, and energy consumption. Following an Algorithm Architecture Matching (AAM) approach, SimSDP will rely on a dataflow model of the algorithm and a model of the target architecture. SimSDP will be based on two existing tools: PREESM and SimGrid. PREESM accurately evaluates heterogeneous single node performance; SimGrid accurately simulates inter-node communications. Then, the association of PREESM and SimGrid will allow for reliable simulations of large scale heterogeneous HPC systems. Thanks to SimSDP, algorithm and architecture spaces will be explored in the SKA context. The new generation of radio astronomy imaging pipelines like ddfacet will be described at a high-level of abstraction suitable for targeting any heterogeneous multinode HPC system SKA may choose in the future. Then, several SDP architecture configurations (number of nodes, kind of accelerators) and several SDP algorithm configurations will be explored together through the large scale simulations offered by SimSDP. Besides, SDP prototypes on MPPA and FPGA designed through High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools and set up at the NenuFAR radio telescope will be developed and profiled on small scale datasets. It will allow to evaluating the potential of low power accelerators as an alternative to the mainstream GPU architecture. These SDP profiling feedbacks on GPU/MPPA/FPGA will fill out SimSDP with annotations on the dataflow graph. SDP prototypes will also be compared with SimSDP simulations on medium scale datasets to evaluate SimSDP new features. Dark-Era will be a consortium gathering complementary skills in computer science, signal processing, and astronomy with twelve permanent members from the SimGrid development Team at IRISA, the PREESM development team at IETR, the inverse problem team at L2S, and two radio astronomy teams at Observatories of Paris and Cˆote d’Azur. Preliminary results obtained by this consortium in collaboration with Atos-Bull during the CNRS SKALLAS project will be pursued. Two PhD students will work on the association of PREESM and SimGrid tools in SimSDP, and two post-docs will be hired. With the support of SKA-France, this 4-year project aims to promote french contributions to SKA such as ddfacet and to be a force of proposal for SKA computing. Finally, Dark-Era intends to be the breeding ground for new international collaborations notably through the Rising STARS European and International network.

While it is not initially included within the three 5G key use cases identified in the reference document of UIT-R published in 2015, broadband Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) is seen by many 5G actors as the first phase of commercial 5G services, to support emerging applications (4K video streaming, Virtual Reality, etc.). Indeed, thanks to the huge amount of spectrum recently released for 5G, including sub-6 GHz bands, FWA allows rapid deployment of novel services at rates sufficiently high to satisfy the needs of future domestic users, at competitive costs in comparison with optical fibre, either in rural areas where the density of homes could not justify an investment in an optical fibre network or in urban/suburban areas where it is not always possible to dig trenches to pass fibre. The FWA user equipment is generally made of an outdoor unit using directive antenna in LOS of 5G small cell Access Point connected through Power Over Ethernet cable to an indoor unit where received signals are routed towards various home equipment’s. The use of a single indoor unit (5G Gateway), could be very attractive: simplified “all in one” product, reduced installation and equipment cost and more flexibility in choosing where to place the 5G-Gateway. However, it requires to operate in the sub-6GHz bands and combine several technologies including Carrier Aggregation and antenna beamforming. Consequently, several challenges should be addressed such as propagation issues including indoor signal penetration loss, interferences, multipath frequency selective fading, as well as the integration of the 5G radio modules and antennas within an increasingly small box. This implies very stringent requirements from the antenna system side in terms of compactness, number of decorrelated and/or directional reconfigurable radiation patterns, with the possibility of simultaneous operation in multiple frequency bands. The objective of COMET-5G project is to leverage on recent and ongoing advances on antenna technologies to address the above issues. By developing adequate modeling and simulation electromagnetic tools and pushing further disruptive concepts (Superdirectivity, coupled array, Network Characteristic Mode theory, Spherical Wave Expansion theory), several designs of ultra-compact though efficient, multi-frequency, miniature antenna radiators, grouped in 3D arrangements to optimally occupy and probably shape the volume of the 5G-Gateway will be designed, realized and measured. Then a compelling demonstrator of an indoor 5G box, integrating sub-antenna systems developed within the project, and illustrating the achieved scientific and technological progress, will be prototyped and tested. The COMET-5G project associates complementary skills of an academic laboratory (IETR-Rennes) specializing in the development of complex antennas, an EPIC (CEA-LETI) European leader in microelectronic technology for telecommunications and an industrial (Technicolor) world leading provider of ultra-broadband access solutions. All the three partners are increasingly working together since many years in collaborative projects, such as the ANR NAOMI project or more recently the ANR SENSAS project. The scientific ambition of COMET-5G project is to solve the current limitations associated with small-sized antennas in terms of the ability to focus energy in privileged directions and frequency bandwidth requirement. The proposed solutions could then revolutionize the art of designing high gain antennas by making them compact and allowing their use in many applications until then inaccessible due to the incompatible size of the antenna. From the broadband access perspective, the development of a single indoor 5G-box achieving gigabit throughputs, and thus presenting a complete parity in terms of performances with wired networks, will offer a unique opportunity to cable companies and telco’s to enter into new markets, expanding beyond the niches of hybrid or nomadic access.

ARTIKA is an industrial research project (as defined by ANR) aiming at making major innovations in modelling, optimization and demonstration of ultra-flat electronically reconfigurable transmitarray (TA) antennas for SATCOM ground terminals and the Internet of Space (IoS) at Ka band. Considering the ambition and the objectives of the ARTIKA project, it is clear that it fits perfectly in the thematic frame no. 3: "Acoustic and radio waves". A TA is typically composed of one or more focal sources illuminating a first antenna array operating in receive mode and connected, using phase-shift elements, to a second antenna array operating in transmission mode. P-i-n diodes, RF-MEMS switches, varactor diodes, ferroelectric varactors, liquid crystal, etc. can be integrated in the unit-cell in order to electronically control the unit-cell transmission phase, and thus reconfigure the antenna beam(s). TAs are high-gain antenna systems realized using multilayer printed circuit technology, which leads to a cost-effective, robust, reliable and ultra-competitive solution for high-volume applications. Thanks to their spatial feeding technique, TAs (as reflectarrays as well) are extremely attractive compared to traditional phased arrays that suffer from large insertion loss in their lossy and bulky beam-forming network. TAs exhibit also a unique advantage compared to reflector antennas and reflectarrays: they can be integrated onto various platforms (buildings, vehicles, aircrafts, UAV, high speed trains, public transportation systems, etc.) since they do not suffer from any feed blockage effect (in contrast to reflectarrays), thus leading to smart skins systems. The pioneering studies carried out by the CEA and the IETR since 2006 have enabled the demonstration of the potentialities of TAs in X-band, (8-12 GHz), Ka-band (26.5-40 GHz) and V-band (50-75 GHz), and E-band (60-90 GHz). Our expertise is currently at the forefront internationally in this field (with very clear leadership in Europe). In particular, several passive prototypes in linear and circular polarization (fixed beam and beam switching) and several reconfigurable TAs (X and Ka bands) of relatively large size (400 elements) have been demonstrated. These pionner developments are at the best level of the current state of the world level. The main objective of ARTIKA is to develop and demonstrate an ultra-flat electrically reconfigurable TA operating in dual-band (Ka-band), dual-circular polarization and excited by a near-field focal system.The developed antenna will demonstrate – for the first time at the international level – low profile electronically steerable antennas for SATCOM at Ka band. The ARTIKA project has five sub-projects (SP): project coordination, dissemination and valorization (SP 1); advanced tools for analysis and optimization of ultra-compact RTs (SP 2); passive and reconfigurable unit-cells with dual-band and dual-polarization (SP 3); near-field focal sources (WP 4); ARTIKA demonstrations (SP 5). The total effort is 84 persons.month over a total duration of 36 months. The consortium gathers three partners (one research institute, one academic institution and one company): CEA LETI, IETR, Thales. both with a very strong and unique expertise on TAs. Indeed CEA LETI and IETR have been collaborating very closely on this topic since 2006 and are the authors of several patents and several journals and conferences papers on TAs.