Dr. Ajith Amerasekera is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) at the University of California, Berkeley and an IEEE Fellow. Ajith received his PhD in 1986 and joined Philips Research Labs, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where he worked on the first submicron CMOS technology. In 1991, he joined Texas Instruments, Dallas, where he made technical contributions ranging from transistors to circuits and systems. He joined UC Berkeley in 2016, and his research interests are in ubiquitous connected systems leveraging electronics in new application areas. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Ajith was CTO for the High Performance Analog Division at Texas Instruments, and a TI Fellow, responsible for strategic technology and business development. In 2008, he was the founding director of TI’s Kilby Research Labs where he was responsible for creating the research processes to address long-term exploration and innovation for new markets and technologies. His innovations have been in use in many of TI’s industry leadership products for over two decades. Ajith has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Solid State Circuits Society, and has over 150 papers and presentations as well as 4 books on integrated circuits. He has been on the technical program committees of many international conferences including the ISSCC, VLSI Symposium, and the IEDM.

Title: Towards the Next Generation of Communications for intelligent Traffic and Autonomous Vehicles

As we look to a future of intelligent traffic and autonomous driving, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications will require significant advances in data rates and latency to meet the required needs for information, control and adaptability to make this happen.  Multiple vehicles will need to simultaneously send and receive large amounts of information about the conditions around them using a variety of sensors.  Video, radar, Lidar, and many other sensors will be gathering information that will need to be transmitted and processed between vehicles in real time with very low latencies.  We see mmWave communications as being an important technology where beamforming and tracking with datarates of the order of 10Gbps are achievable under mobile conditions.  There are many challenges in adapting these technologies to high mobility environments including coherency, interference, and adaptability.  This presentation will provide a high level overview of the research in that area, and how some of these challenges will be addressed to enable intelligent and predictive traffic with vehicles that are closely networked and learning from each other.