Pang Cao

Dr. Zizheng Cao is a tenured Assistant Professor in the field of beam-steered optoelectronic system in the Electro-Optical Communications (ECO) Group of Department of Electrical Engineering, TU/e. Dr. Cao’s research interests stem from his curiosity on how to efficiently deliver and detect wireless signals. It is a key for wireless communication and remote/non-invasive sensing. Next to the existing technologies in time and frequency domain, the approaches of spatial focusing and isolation are widely recognized as promising but not fully established solutions. Dr. Cao’s major research effort is to enable efficient delivery and detection of weak signals by means of beam-steering/forming. He mainly works at two areas: 1) new mechanisms, devices, algorithms and architectures to enable lightwave / millimeter wave various kinds of beam steering systems, including scenarios of line-of-sight (LoS), non-line-of-sight (NLoS) and complex wavefront; 2) applications of beam steering systems to indoor communication (e.g. optical wireless communication, OWC), metrology (e.g. LiDAR) and healthcare (e.g. blood sensing). His pioneering work results in a complete optically controlled mm-wave beam steering communication system, a new type of OWC transmitters for OWC system with NLoS beam steering, and a new design approach to simultaneously optimize optical and electrical properties of OWC receivers. These results lead to several publications in Nature LSA, Wiley LPR (cover story) and invited papers in IEEE journals. Dr. Cao has established a complete set of hardware and software to carry out aforementioned research, including state-of-art OWC testbeds, advanced IM-DD and coherent DSP algorithms (offline and real time), self-developed design kit of functional photonic system-on-chip (photonic integrated circuit, PIC), and automatic measurement setups of electrooptical chips.