Alex Wege wins best student poster at IEEE WAMICON 2024

Alumnus Alex Wege is the recipient of a best student poster award at the IEEE WAMICON 2024 held in April in Clearwater, Florida. Wege placed third in the competition for his poster titled, “Characterization of Zynq® FPGA for Microwave Ferromagnetic Resonance Identification (FMR-ID).”

Wege’s poster presents how a Xilinx radio frequency system on chip (RFSoC) and RF frontend/daughter card can be used for chipless, microwave radio frequency identification (RFID) measurements in place of a vector network analyzer (VNA). VNAs typically are too large and expensive to be commercially used, which confines them to laboratory environments. Wege’s characterization of this system that is based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) can support the easy commercialization of chipless RFID and contribute to its wider use. 

Wege earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science (spring 2020) during which time he focused on embedded systems. As a graduate student he focused on wireless/microwave systems and joined McKnight Presidential Endowed Professor Rhonda Franklin’s laboratory as a member of her research team. He worked on developing a chipless RFID reader driven by his interest in software defined radio. Wege is a ham radio operator and his hobby has inspired some of his academic and research interests. 

Wege graduated with his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in spring 2024, and is currently working with Tomorrow.io on the development of their software defined radar system for spaced based weather radar.