Perl Award Ceremony

The Perl award is given annually to exceptional graduate students in the field of communications and information theory. The prize is in honor of the late Dr. Joseph Perl, and has been kindly donated by his family and friends.

The 2022 awardees are Erez Zolkov  and Yotam Gershon

Following a short ceremony, the two awardees will give 20 minute talks:

Erez Zolkov   (Ph.D. student), ” Transceiver architectures for fully integrated division duplex systems with wideband TX interference cancellation”

Abstract:
In my work I investigate front-end architectures that support simultaneous operation of several unrelated links, for next generation cellular and Wi-Fi applications. For example, in simultaneous dual-band (SDB) operation two transceivers operate simultaneously and independently in separate frequency bands for full bidirectional throughput. SDB transceivers support both modes of receiver (RX) and transmitter (TX) carrier aggregation, and frequency division duplexing (FDD), in which one band’s TX and the other band’s RX operate simultaneously. The main challenge in realizing an SDB transceiver is the mitigation of powerful TX signals between the two operating bands, while maintaining receiver performance, with tunable wideband response, and decent noise figure (NF), linearity and power consumption. To deal with the above challenges, current SDB implementations use external diplexers, which are bulky, expensive and cannot be tunable. To eliminate the need for external diplexers, we propose the utilization of N-path filters (NPF) and mixer-first receivers (MFRX) in a fully integrated SDB system, as a replacement for the external filters. N-path circuits can be easily integrated and propose selectivity with high out-of-band (OOB) linearity and decent noise figure (NF) performance. A discrete and an integrated FDD implementations are shown, and measurement results are presented.

Yotam Gershon (M.Sc. student), ” Genomic Compression with Read Alignment at the Decoder”
Supervisor: Prof. Yuval Cassuto
Abstract:
The sequencing of genomic data is a rapidly developing field with vast applications in modern biological and medical research. Modern technologies are based on collecting many short fragments, called reads, from random locations within the sequence. The huge amount of raw data that is produced makes the use of efficient compression tools essential. In this work, we propose a new compression scheme for raw-reads data, that are communicated to a remote database that contains a closely similar reference genome, acting as side information. The compression scheme is based on the framework of distributed source coding, using a generalized error locating codes construction, with added layers of read alignment to the reference and alignment validation, both performed at the decoder, while keeping the encoder with extremely low complexity.