Francesco Amato, Christopher Peterson, and Muhammad Bashir Akbar won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE RFID-TA 2015 Conference, held September 16-18 in Tokyo, Japan.

Their paper entitled, “Long Range and Low Powered RFID Tags with Tunnel Diodes,” demonstrates how to combine antennas with quantum tunneling devices to produce ultra-low powered means of wireless communications over extraordinarily long distances. Two of the student authors — Amato and Peterson — co-presented the paper in Tokyo. Amato and Akbar are currently Ph.D. students in Professor Gregory D. Durgin’s research group at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), while Christopher Peterson (who performed the research as an undergraduate student in Durgin's group) began graduate studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign this fall.

Coincidentally, the conference’s Best Overall Paper Award went to Azhar Hasan for his paper entitled, “Towards Pervasive Soil Moisture Sensing using RFID Tag Antenna-Based Sensors.” Hasan recently started working as an assistant professor in Pakistan, having received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech ECE, where he was advised by Professor Andrew F. Peterson.