Love of Extreme Sports Drives Goal to Provide Internet Connectivity to the World

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Professor Chisum developed a passion for the outdoors, whether mountaineering, biking, or hiking. “In high school, I fell in love with Physics,” said Professor Chisum. “I was intrigued by the ability to predict things mathematically. Likewise, the extreme sports I enjoy demand accuracy in my calculations, or you face dire circumstances. Engineering provides the ideal combination of physics/mathematics, significant problems, and realistic solutions. The area of electrical engineering was intriguing because I liked the idea that something so small and invisible could be so powerful and harnessed to do so much.”

Chisum received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Seattle Pacific University and, from there, worked as a hardware design engineer in the aerospace industry. He designed advanced systems for aerospace networks, including electronic and software design. After three years in industry, he went back to school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he studied electromagnetics and received his MS and Ph.D. 

Chisum related the following story, “In high school, my friend and I used to wait for a Winter Storm Warning from the weather service, throw our backpacks in the truck, climb a mountain in a blizzard at night and set up camp on the summit. From this vantage point we would try to connect to the distant cell towers using my mom’s 2G cell phone in order to call our friends–usually without success. Currently, I am working on low-cost and low-power millimeter-wave radios and antennas to enable reliable and pervasive access to 5G and 6G mobile wireless networks as well as global access to space-based internet.” 

The goal of Chisum’s lab is to provide persistent internet connectivity over the entire globe. In the lab, researchers design antennas with very high performance and low-cost and complexity for space-based internet user terminals. The challenge is that the terminals must be very high-performing to have high data rates to satellites moving at high speeds across the sky. Yet they must also be compact, low-cost, and low-power for suitability in commercial markets and deployable on a wide range of platforms (e.g., homes, vehicles, aircraft, field sensors). By taking advantage of 3D artificial materials, the path of electromagnetic waves through antennas can be precisely prescribed to achieve high performance. Yet, the material does all the work–these antennas require no power to operate. 

With advances in high-resolution 3D printing, the antennas can be realized at a very low cost. Global high-speed internet coverage enables new applications and closes the digital divide, improving digital access to underserved and rural communities. This work will help bring this coverage to more users and open up new (e.g., small) platforms to enable entirely new solutions.

Professor Chisum’s broad area of research is in applied electromagnetism with applications in wireless communications and sensing. He is interested in bringing high-performance wireless to diverse and pervasive platforms like small sensors, micro-UAVs, and mobile devices. To accomplish this, “we exploit emerging materials and devices that bring about new capability or can be used to fundamentally transform the performance/complexity tradeoff of traditional circuits/systems.” His research not only allows him to try blue-sky ideas to disrupt a problem space but to engage with leading government and industry partners who are trying to solve critical and fundamentally challenging problems. “Every semester, my undergraduate students come in with fresh inspiration, which inspires me to stay relevant and encourages me always to be learning.”