John Kimionis won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 IEEE RFID TA Conference, held September 8-9 in Tampere, Finland. Kimionis is a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is the first student from Georgia Tech to receive this honor.

The title of Kimionis’ paper is "RF Tag Front-End Design for Uncompromised Communication and Harvesting," coauthored with ECE Professor Emmanouil M. Tentzeris, his Ph.D. advisor.

In this work, a novel RF front-end is designed, analyzed, and implemented that overcomes the critical limitation of compromised communication performance of wireless sensor network nodes that employ backscattering radio as a low-cost, low-power communication means when employing an energy harvester. The presented results could have a significant impact in the first real-world, large-scale implementation of autonomous, long-range Internet-of-Things, machine-to-machine (M2M), emergency response, and "smart skin" topologies effectively utilizing multiple forms of ambient energy.

IEEE RFID-TA 2014 is the premier IEEE conference in RFID technical applications. It is sponsored by the IEEE CRFID committee, which is endorsed by nine IEEE societies.