Highlights from the Biggest Antennas and Propagation Conference in Europe

EuCAP is the biggest and most relevant conference on antennas and propagation that you can find in Europe nowadays. This year the conference was held in Davos, Switzerland from April 10 to 15, and was once again, a central point to meet universities, organizations and companies from all over the world.

A bit of history and one of the reasons why this conference is so successful – Davos was in fact the place where the idea to create this conference originated in 2000 within the framework of the AP2000 Millennium Conference on Antennas & Propagation. The EuCAP as such started in 2006, being held in Nice, France and this year in Davos, they also announced the conference in 2017 will be in Paris and will move to London in 2018.

 I was in Davos in 2000 and this year, and it was amazing to see how this event has increased and kept its prestige over the years, something the organization is willing to continue further improving. I like the survey EuCAP’s organization launched this year to identify ways to increase the interactions between industry, government organizations and academia. Although the amount of interactions depend on the regions, I think in general there should be more and closer interactions. Feel free to take a look at such survey here.

About the Keynotes – The conference started with 3 interesting keynotes. Dr. Wen Tong, CTO Huawei Wireless, began with “Bringing 5G into Reality”, where he highlighted the increase in the number of links, the importance of the network latency and the fact that 5G is more than just speed. He also mentioned that the radio technology cycle (from research to market) is around 10 years and with 5G, it is more difficult to find the right technologies. Another aspect he raised was the difficulties to have the same frequency bands across all regions, which is important to ensure a good user experience when travelling between countries. Finally, he presented the challenges they face, regarding the design of the antennas on the base station and user sides.

Afterwards, Andreas F. Molisch, Fellow IEEE, gave a keynote where he highlighted the differences in the channel behavior when communications are done at millimeter waves instead of using microwaves, including wave propagations effects, wall penetration losses and body shadowing effects which can cause voice and data connections to break.

The third keynote was from Zoya Popovic, who gave an overview of approaches and designs they have done related to millimeter-wave and THz antennas for imaging and radar applications (considering frequencies from 100 GHz to 2 THz).

Altair continues to be one of the key sponsors of the EuCAP, with a busy booth and our team presented also at several sessions, including the latest extensions of FEKO and applications like how FEKO is helping to design antennas for automotive ACC radars in complex environments at 76-77 GHz. The technical program of the conference can be found here.

And last but not least, at the conference, we were proud to announce and see the interest from many existing users and new prospects in the addition of WinProp to the Altair family. WinProp is a leading simulation software for wave propagation and radio network planning, which combined with FEKO, allows amazing solutions including vehicle-to-vehicle communications and autonomous driving vehicles.

This post also appears on the Altair Innovation Intelligence blog.