New Integrated Sensing And Communication Approach Awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

ECE PhD students Jinze Shi and Yang Lan developed an integrated photonics platform that could empower the future of 6G wireless networks, advancing driverless cars and more.

Whether it’s four-way stops, construction detours, or game day crowds flooding the streets, self-driving cars need to be able to accurately sense their surrounding environment while communicating a safe and efficient pathway to their controls. However, current radio-frequency (RF) electronics that support sensing and communication are limited due to bandwidth and scaling restrictions in the millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz regimes. 

To solve this problem, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) doctoral students Jinze Shi and Yang Lan developed an integrated photonics method that allows communication and sensing to share the same platform and signal pathways, which could enable the future of 6G wireless networks.

“It’s really exciting, because every day we rely on radio frequency for communication and sensing applications, like when we use our phones, access the internet, or take autonomous or semi-autonomous transit,” Shi said. “So our research can help advance this field to better serve daily life.”

Unlike current methods, their chip-scale coherent photonic RF front-end approach uses reconfigurable architecture that supports both sensing and communication simultaneously.

“Classic RF chains have always struggled to meet the requirements for simultaneous signals, due to architectural limitations with the electrical RF component,” Lan said. “But by using the photonics RF front-end instead of the electrical component, we can basically bypass these limitations.”

Their approach enables wideband distribution, low loss, precise timing, and coherent signal generation for radio frequencies. It also supports cost-scalable manufacturing, because it’s more energy efficient and the packaging is simpler than the traditional electrical components. 

Shi and Lan were each awarded a 2026 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for this research, which they call “Heterogeneous Electro-Optic RF-Optical Front-End for 6G (HERO-6G).”

“The Qualcomm fellowship connects us directly to people in the industry, so we’re getting really helpful perspectives on real-world applications,” Lan said. “It’s really useful advice, because we want our research to support large-scale manufacturing for real-world impact.”

The fellowship supports the next phase of the project, which focuses on hardware design and testing. Shi and Lan are also testing the integrated photonics chip approach for different materials. 

“We’re going to test and improve the fabrication process for each part, because we combine a lot of platforms together into the same chip,” Shi said. “So we’re first working to solve different issues on different platforms, and then we’ll see what happens when we combine them all together.”

Shi earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science degrees in Physics from Shanghai Tech University. Lan earned his Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from U-M and was a recipient of a 2025 EECS Outstanding Researcher Award. 

Shi and Lan are advised by Prof. Di Liang, and their work is supported by the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility.