Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS

Department for Electronic Measurements and Signal Processing (EMS)

About us

© Fraunhofer IIS
Motion emulator, platform "SatCom".
© Fraunhofer IIS
Anechoic chamber, platform "OTA".

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is one of the world’s leading application-oriented research institutions for microelectronic and IT system solutions and services. It is the largest of all Fraunhofer Institutes. Founded in 1985 in Erlangen, Fraunhofer IIS now has 14 locations in 11 cities: Erlangen (headquarters), Nürnberg, Fürth and Dresden, as well as Bamberg, Waischenfeld, Coburg, Würzburg, Ilmenau, Deggendorf and Passau.

The Electronic Measurements and Signal Processing (EMS) department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is located on the campus of Technische Universität Ilmenau. Together with the same-named chair at the Institute for Information Technology of TU Ilmenau the department forms a research group that employs about 40 researchers.  Under the leadership of Professor Giovanni Del Galdo the group does research in the field of mobile communications and signal processing and transfers fundamental scientific results into application-oriented projects funded by public and industrial partners.

With its Facility for over-the-air Research and Testing (FORTE) the department possesses excellent equipment for the measurement, reproduction and development of wireless communication technologies. There are two research platforms in this globally unique facility: the "Satellite Communications – SatCom" platform allows realistic tests of mobile satellite terminals that can be found for instance on ships or off-road vehicles.

The second research platform "Over-The-Air testing – OTA" allows the realistic emulation of electromagnetic wave fields in the frequency range of 1 up to 6 Gigahertz, that can be used to test and evaluate communication devices such as mobile phones or GPS receivers under adjustable realistic and reproducible limit conditions.

Research focus

  • Channel sounding und modeling up to 60 GHz
  • Emulation of virtual EM environments (e.g. wave-field synthesis)
  • Signal processing and algorithms
    • Compressed sensing and sparsity promoting reconstruction
    • High resolution parameter estimation (e.g. DOA estimation)

Applications

  • Communication (mobile, SatCom, V2X)
  • Localization and navigation (GNSS, direction finder, radar)
  • Non-destructive testing (ultrasound and x-ray)