Dr. Omar Ramahi of University of Waterloo

Abstract: The field of EMI/EMC shares its heritage with antenna and propagation engineers, on the one hand, and physicists on the other. For the former group, much of the 20th century was spent on developing ways to predict the radiation due to some source through complex analytical and numerical schemes. Physicists, on the other hand, are interested in making the connection between the movement of the elementary charged particle, the electron, and the radiated field. Since the field of EMI/EMC engineering is related to a large degree to radiation, EMI/EMC engineers would naturally be interested in the work of these two groups. However, EMI/EMC engineers have keen interest in understanding which sources/currents are the ones that cause radiation; a question that is typically ignored by the two groups of physicists and propagation engineers. After all, if the source of radiation is found, containing it becomes easier than not knowing it in the first place. In this talk we explore the fundamental question of "what causes radiation" from a purely practical and engineering-relevant perspective. We show that powerful numerical schemes, circuit models, and analytical techniques, while potentially providing elegant and full solution to the radiating problem, fail to highlight the physical phenomenon of interest to EMI/EMC engineers in the first place unless careful attention is paid to… the fundamental sources of radiation!

Biography:

Omar M. Ramahi received the BS degrees in Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering from Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1993 to 2000, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (presently, HP), where he was a member of the alpha server product development group. In 2000, he joined the faculty of the James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park as an Assistant Professor and later as a tenured Associate Professor. At Maryland he was also a faculty member of the CALCE Electronic Products and Systems Center. Presently, he is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is a co-author of the book EMI/EMC Computational Modeling Handbook, 2nd Ed. Professor Ramahi has served as a consultant to several companies. Professor Ramahi won the Excellent Paper Award in the 2004 International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Sendai, Japan, and the 2010 University of Waterloo Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision. In 2012, Professor Ramahi was awarded the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society Technical Achievement Award. Dr. Ramahi is an elected IEEE Fellow. In 2009, he served as a Co-Guest Editor for the Journal of Applied Physics Special Issue on Metamaterials and Photonics. From 2007-2015, he served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging. From 2010-2012, he served as an IEEE EMC Society Distinguished Lecturer. In 2014, he served as a Guest Editor for the journal Sensors, special issue on Metamaterial-Inspired Sensors. He has authored over 390 journal and conference papers.

Email:

Address:Waterloo, Ontario, Canada